QUEEN    ELIZABETH 


s  Btst  f£)istorits 


ENGLAND 


BY 
JOHN    RICHARD  GREEN,  LL.D. 


Illustrated 


WITH  A  SUPPLEMENTARY  CHAPTER  OF  RECENT  EVENTS 

BY  JULIAN  HAWTHORNE 


IN    FOUR    VOLUMES 
VOLUME  TWO 


NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 
THE  CO-OPERATIVE  PUBLICATION  SOCIETY 


HISTORY  OF  ENGLAND 

VOLUME  TWO 


2064912 


(XOTTEKTS. 


BOOK  V. 

THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1640. 

CHAPTER  I. 

MM 

THB  HOUSE  OF  YORK.    1461—1485 11 

CHAPTER  II. 
THE  REVIVAL  OP  LEABHINQ.    1485—1514      .....        78 

CHAPTER  IIL 
WOLSEY.     1514—1529 Ill 

CHAPTER  IV. 
THOMAS  CROMWELL.    1529—1540    .       .  .       .  147 


BOOK  VI. 
THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608. 

CHAPTER   I. 
THB  PROTESTANT  REVOLUTION.    1540—1558  ....       SOI 

CHAPTER  IL 
THB  CATHOLIC  REACTION.    1553—1558    .  S46 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER  IIL 

Mm 
THE  ENGLAND  OF  ELIZABETH.    1558—1561     ....       297 

CHAPTER  IV. 
ENGLAND  AND  MAEY  STUART.    1561—1567    ....       881 

CHAPTER  V. 
ENGLAND  AND  THE  PAPACY.    1567— 157«       ...»       867 

CHAPTER  VL 
ENGLAND  AND  SPAIN.    1583—1593 420 

CHAPTER  VIL 
THE  ENGLAND  OF  SHAKSPERE.    1093—1603    .       ...       456 


BOOK  V. 
THE  MONARCHY. 

1461—1540. 


AUTHORITIES  FOR  BOOK  V. 

1461—1540. 

Edward  the  Fifth  is  the  subject  of  a  work  attributed  to  Sir 
Thomas  More,  and  which  almost  certainly  derives  much  of  its  im- 
portance from  Archbishop  Morton.  Whatever  its  historical  worth 
may  be,  it  is  remarkable  in  its  English  form  as  the  first  historical 
work  of  any  literary  value  which  we  possess  written  in  our  modern 
prose.  The  "  Letters  and  Papers  of  Richard  the  Third  and  Henry 
the  Seventh, "  some  "  Memorials  of  Henry  the  Seventh, "  including 
his  life  by  Bernard  Andre  of  Toulouse,  and  a  volume  of  "  Materials" 
for  a  history  of  his  reign  have  been  edited  for  the  Rolls  Series.  A 
biography  of  Henry  is  among  the  works  of  Lord  Bacon.  The  his- 
tory of  Erasmus  in  England  must  be  followed  in  his  own  interesting 
letters  ;  the  most  accessible  edition  of  the  typical  book  of  the  revi- 
val, the  "  Utopia, "  is  the  Elizabethan  translation,  published  by  Mr. 
Arber.  Mr.  Lupton  has  done  much  to  increase  our  scanty  knowl- 
edge of  Colet  by  his  recent  editions  of  several  of  his  works.  Halle's 
Chronicle  extends  from  the  reign  of  Edward  the  Fourth  to  that  of 
Henry  the  Eighth  ;  for  the  latter  he  is  copied  by  Grafton  and  fol- 
lowed by  Holinshed.  Cavendish  has  given  a  faithful  and  touching 
account  of  Wolsey  in  his  later  days,  but  for  any  real  knowledge  of 
his  administration  or  the  foreign  policy  of  Henry  the  Eighth  we 
must  turn  from  these  to  the  invaluable  Calendars  of  State  Papers  for 
this  period  from  the  English,  Spanish,  and  Austrian  archives,  with 
the  prefaces  of  Professor  Brewer  and  Mr.  Bergenroth.  Cromwell's 
early  life  as  told  by  Foxe  is  a  mass  of  fable,  and  the  State  Papers 
afford  the  only  real  information  as  to  his  ministry.  For  Sir  Thomas 
More  we  have  a  touching  life  by  his  son-in-law,  Roper.  The  more 
important  documents  for  the  religious  history  of  the  time  will  be 
found  in  Mr.  Pocock's  edition  of  Burnet's  "History  of  the  Reforma- 
tion ;"  those  relating  to  the  dissolution  of  the  monasteries  in  the 
collection  of  letters  on  that  subject  published  by  the  Camden  Society, 
and  in  the  "  Original  Letters"  of  Sir  Henry  Ellis.  A  mass  of  mate- 
rials of  very  various  value  has  been  accumulated  by  Strype  in  his 
collections,  which  commence  at  this  period. 


CHAPTER  I. 

THE  HOUSE  OP  YORK. 
1461-1485. 

WITH  the  victory  of  Towton  the  war  of  the  succession 
came  practically  to  an  end.  Though  Margaret  still  strug- 
gled on  the  northern  border  and  the  treachery  of  Warwick 
for  a  while  drove  the  new  king  from  his  realm,  this  gleam 
of  returning  fortune  only  brought  a  more  fatal  ruin  on  the 
House  of  Lancaster  and  seated  the  House  of  York  more 
firmly  on  the  throne.  But  the  Wars  of  the  Roses  did  far 
more  than  ruin  one  royal  house  or  set  up  another.  They 
found  England,  in  the  words  of  Commines,  "among  all 
the  world's  lordships  of  which  I  have  knowledge,  that 
where  the  public  weal  is  best  ordered,  and  where  least  vio- 
lence reigns  over  the  people."  An  English  King— the 
shrewd  observer  noticed — "can  undertake  no  enterprise 
of  account  without  assembling  his  Parliament,  which  is  a 
thing  most  wise  and  holy,  and  therefore  are  these  kings 
stronger  and  better  served"  than  the  despotic  sovereigns 
of  the  Continent.  The  English  kingship,  as  a  judge,  Sir 
John  Fortescue,  could  boast  when  writing  at  this  time, 
was  not  an  absolute  but  a  limited  monarchy ;  the  land  was 
not  a  land  where  the  will  of  the  prince  was  itself  the  law, 
but  where  the  prince  could  neither  make  laws  nor  impose 
taxes  save  by  his  subjects'  consent.  At  no  time  had  Par- 
liament played  so  constant  and  prominent  a  part  in  the 
government  of  the  realm.  At  no  time  had  the  principles 
of  constitutional  liberty  seemed  so  thoroughly  understood 
and  so  dear  to  the  people  at  large.  The  long  Parliamen- 
tary contest  between  the  Crown  and  the  two  Houses  since 
the  days  of  Edward  the  First  had  firmly  established  the 


12  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       |BOOK  v 

great  securities  of  national  liberty — the  right  of  freedom 
from  arbitrary  taxation,  from  arbitrary  legislation,  from 
arbitrary  imprisonment,  and  the  responsibility  of  even  the 
highest  servants  of  the  Crown  to  Parliament  and  to  the 
law. 

But  with  the  close  of  the  struggle  for  the  succession  this 
liberty  suddenly  disappeared.  If  the  Wars  of  the  Roses 
failed  in  utterly  destroying  English  freedom,  they  suc- 
ceeded in  arresting  its  progress  for  more  than  a  hundred 
years.  With  them  we  enter  on  an  epoch  of  constitutional 
retrogression  in  which  the  slow  work  of  the  age  that  went 
before  it  was  rapidly  undone.  From  the  accession  of  Ed- 
ward the  Fourth  Parliamentary  life  was  almost  suspended, 
or  was  turned  into  a  mere  form  by  the  overpowering  in- 
fluence of  the  Crown.  The  legislative  powers  of  the  two 
Houses  were  usurped  by  the  royal  Council.  Arbitrary 
taxation  reappeared  in  benevolences  and  forced  loans. 
Personal  liberty  was  almost  extinguished  by  a  formidable 
spy-system  and  by  the  constant  practice  of  arbitrary  im- 
prisonment. Justice  was  degraded  by  the  prodigal  use  of 
bills  of  attainder,  by  a  wide  extension  of  the  judicial  power 
of  the  royal  Council,  by  the  servility  of  judges,  by  the 
coercion  of  juries.  So  vast  and  sweeping  was  the  change 
that  to  careless  observers  of  a  later  day  the  constitutional 
monarchy  of  the  Edwards  and  the  Henries  seemed  sud- 
denly to  have  transformed  itself  under  the  Tudors  into  a 
despotism  as  complete  as  the  despotism  of  the  Turk.  Such 
a  view  is  no  doubt  exaggerated  and  unjust.  Bend  and 
strain  the  law  as  he  might,  there  never  was  a  time  when 
the  most  wilful  of  English  rulers  failed  to  own  the  re- 
straints of  law;  and  the  obedience  of  the  most  servile 
among  English  subjects  lay  within  bounds,  at  once  politi- 
cal and  religious,  which  no  theory  of  King- worship  could 
bring  them  to  overpass.  But  even  if  we  make  these  re- 
serves, the  character  of  the  monarchy  from  the  days  of 
Edward  the  Fourth  to  the  days  of  Elizabeth  remains  some- 
thing strange  and  isolated  in  our  history.  It  is  hard  to 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  18 

connect  the  kingship  of  the  old  English,  the  Norman,  the 
Angevin,  or  the  Plantagenet  kings  with  the  kingship  of 
the  House  of  York  or  of  the  House  of  Tudor. 

The  primary  cause  of  this  great  change  lay  in  the  re- 
covery of  its  older  strength  by  the  Crown.  Through  the 
last  hundred  and  fifty  years  the  monarchy  had  been  ham- 
pered by  the  pressure  of  the  war.  Through  the  last  fifty 
it  had  been  weakened  by  the  insecurity  of  a  disputed  suc- 
cession. It  was  to  obtain  supplies  for  the  strife  with  Scot- 
land and  the  strife  with  France  that  the  earlier  Plantage- 
nets  had  been  forced  to  yield  to  the  ever-growing  claims 
which  were  advanced  by  the  Parliament.  It  was  to  win 
the  consent  of  Parliament  to  its  occupation  of  the  throne 
and  its  support  against  every  rival  that  the  house  of  Lan- 
caster bent  yet  more  humbly  to  its  demands.  But  with 
the  loss  of  Guienne  the  war  with  France  came  virtually  to 
an  end.  The  war  with  Scotland  died  down  into  a  series 
of  border  forays.  The  Wars  of  the  Roses  settled  the  ques- 
tion of  the  succession,  first  by  the  seeming  extinction  of 
the  House  of  Lancaster,  and  then  by  the  utter  ruin  of  the 
House  of  York.  The  royal  treasury  was  not  only  relieved 
from  the  drain  which  had  left  the  crown  at  the  mercy  of 
the  Third  Estate ;  it  was  filled  as  it  had  never  been  filled 
before  by  the  forfeitures  and  confiscations  of  the  civil  war. 
In  the  one  bill  of  attainder  which  followed  Towton  twelve 
great  nobles  and  more  than  a  hundred  knights  and  squires 
were  stripped  of  their  estates  to  the  king's  profit.  Nearly 
a  fifth  of  the  land  is  said  to  have  passed  into  the  royal  pos- 
session at  one  period  or  other  of  the  civil  strife.  Edward  the 
Fourth  and  Henry  the  Seventh  not  only  possessed  a  power 
untrammelled  by  the  difficulties  which  had  beset  the  Crown 
since  the  days  of  Edward  the  First,  but  they  were  masters 
of  a  wealth  such  as  the  Crown  had  never  known  since  the 
days  of  Henry  the  Second.  Throughout  their  reigns  these 
kings  showed  a  firm  resolve  to  shun  the  two  rocks  on  which 
the  monarchy  had  been  so  nearly  wrecked.  No  policy 
was  too  inglorious  that  enabled  them  to  avoid  the  need 


14  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

of  war.  The  inheritance  of  a  warlike  policy,  the  con- 
sciousness of  great  military  abilities,  the  cry  of  his  own 
people  for  a  renewal  of  the  struggle,  failed  to  lure  Edward 
from  his  system  of  peace.  Henry  clung  to  peace  in  spite 
of  the  threatening  growth  of  the  French  monarchy :  he  re- 
fused to  be  drawn  into  any  serious  war  even  by  its  ac- 
quisition of  Brittany  and  of  the  coast-line  that  ran  un- 
broken along  the  Channel.  Nor  was  any  expedient  too 
degrading  if  it  swelled  the  royal  hoard.  Edward  by  a 
single  stroke,  the  grant  of  the  customs  to  the  king  for  life, 
secured  a  source  of  revenue  which  went  far  to  relieve  the 
Crown  from  its  dependence  on  Parliament.  He  stooped 
to  add  to  the  gold  which  his  confiscations  amassed  by 
trading  on  a  vast  scale;  his  ships,  freighted  with  tin, 
wool,  and  cloth,  made  the  name  of  the  merchant-king  fa- 
mous in  the  ports  of  Italy  and  Greece.  Henry  was  as 
adroit  and  as  shameless  a  financier  as  his  predecessor.  He 
was  his  own  treasurer,  he  kept  his  own  accounts,  he  ticked 
off  with  his  own  hand  the  compositions  he  levied  on  the 
western  shires  for  their  abortive  revolts. 

With  peace  and  a  full  treasury  the  need  for  calling  Par- 
liament together  was  removed.  The  collapse  of  the  Houses 
was  in  itself  a  revolution.  Up  to  this  moment  they  had 
played  a  more  and  more  prominent  part  in  the  government 
of  the  realm.  The  progress  made  under  the  earlier  Plan- 
tagenets  had  gone  as  steadily  on  under  Henry  the  Fourth 
and  his  successor.  The  Commons  had  continued  their  ad- 
vance. Not  only  had  the  right  of  self -taxation  and  of  the 
initiation  of  laws  been  explicitly  yielded  to  them,  but  they 
had  interfered  with  the  administration  of  the  state,  had 
directed  the  application  of  subsidies,  and  called  royal  min« 
isters  to  account  by  repeated  instances  of  impeachment. 
Under  the  first  two  kings  of  the  House  of  Lancaster  Par- 
liament had  been  summoned  almost  every  year.  Under 
Henry  the  Sixth  an  important  step  was  made  in  constitu- 
tional progress  by  abandoning  the  old  form  of  presenting 
the  requests  of  Parliament  in  the  form  of  petitions  which 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  15 

were  subsequently  moulded  into  statutes  by  the  royal 
Council.  The  statute  itself  in  its  final  form  was  now 
presented  for  the  royal  assent  and  the  Crown  deprived  of 
all  opportunity  of  modifying  it.  But  with  the  reign  of 
Edward  the  Fourth  not  only  this  progress  but  the  very 
action  of  Parliament  comes  almost  to  an  end.  For  the 
first  time  since  the  days  of  John  not  a  single  law  which 
promoted  freedom  or  remedied  the  abuses  of  power  was 
even  proposed.  The  Houses  indeed  were  only  rarely  called 
together  by  Edward ;  they  were  only  once  summoned  dur- 
ing the  last  thirteen  years  of  Henry  the  Seventh.  But 
this  discontinuance  of  Parliamentary  life  was  not  due 
merely  to  the  new  financial  system  of  the  crown.  The 
policy  of  the  kings  was  aided  by  the  internal  weakness  of 
Parliament  itself.  No  institution  suffered  more  from  the 
civil  war.  The  Houses  became  mere  gatherings  of  nobles 
with  their  retainers  and  partisans.  They  were  like  armed 
camps  to  which  the  great  lords  came  with  small  armies  at 
their  backs.  When  arms  were  prohibited  the  retainers  of 
the  warring  barons  appeared,  as  in  the  Club  Parliament 
of  1426,  with  clubs  on  their  shoulders.  When  clubs  were 
forbidden  they  hid  stones  and  balls  of  lead  in  their  clothes. 
Amid  scenes  such  as  these  the  faith  in  and  reverence 
for  Parliaments  could  hardly  fail  to  die  away.  But  the 
very  success  of  the  House  of  York  was  a  more  fatal  blow 
to  the  trust  in  them.  It  was  by  the  act  of  the  Houses  that 
the  Lancastrian  line  had  been  raised  to  the  throne.  Its 
title  was  a  Parliamentary  title.  Its  existence  was  in  fact 
a  contention  that  the  will  of  Parliament  could  override  the 
claims  of  blood  in  the  succession  to  the  throne.  With  all 
this  the  civil  war  dealt  roughly  and  decisively.  The  Par- 
liamentary line  was  driven  from  the  throne.  The  Parlia- 
mentary title  was  set  aside  as  usurpation.  The  House  of 
York  based  its  claim  to  the  throne  on  the  incapacity  of 
Parliament  to  set  aside  pretensions  which  were  based  on 
sheer  nearness  of  blood.  The  fall  of  the  House  of  Lancas- 
ter, the  accession  of  the  Yorkist  Kings,  must  have  seemed 


16  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [Boos  V. 

to  the  men  who  had  witnessed  the  struggle  a  crushing  de- 
feat of  the  Parliament. 

Weakened  by  failure,  discredited  by  faction,  no  longer 
needful  as  a  source  of  supplies,  it  was  easy  for  the  Mon- 
archy to  rid  itself  of  the  check  of  the  two  Houses,  and 
their  riddance  at  once  restored  the  Crown  to  the  power  it 
had  held  under  the  earlier  Kings.  But  in  actual  fact  Ed- 
ward the  Fourth  found  himself  the  possessor  of  a  far  greater 
authority  than  this.  The  structure  of  feudal  society  fronted 
a  feudal  King  with  two  great  rival  powers  in  the  Baron- 
age and  the  Church.  Even  in  England,  though  feudalism 
had  far  less  hold  than  elsewhere,  the  noble  and  the  priest 
formed  effective  checks  on  the  Monarchy.  But  at  the  close 
of  the  Wars  of  the  Roses  these  older  checks  no  longer  served 
as  restraints  upon  the  action  of  the  Crown.  With  the 
growth  of  Parliament  the  weight  of  the  Baronage  as  a 
separate  constitutional  element  in  the  realm,  even  the  sep- 
arate influence  of  the  Church,  had  fallen  more  and  more 
into  decay.  For  their  irregular  and  individual  action  was 
gradually  substituted  the  legal  and  continuous  action  of 
the  three  Estates ;  and  now  that  the  assembly  of  the  estates 
practically  ceased  it  was  too  late  to  revive  the  older  checks 
which  in  earlier  days  had  fettered  the  action  of  the  Crown. 
The  kingship  of  Edward  and  his  successors  therefore  was 
not  a  mere  restoration  of  the  kingship  of  John  or  of  Henry 
the  Second.  It  was  the  kingship  of  those  Kings  apart 
from  the  constitutional  forces  which  in  their  case  stood 
side  by  side  with  kingship,  controlling  and  regulating  its 
action,  apart  from  the  force  of  custom,  from  the  strong 
arm  of  the  baron,  from  the  religious  sanctions  which 
formed  so  effective  a  weapon  in  the  hands  of  the  priest,  in 
a  word  apart  from  that  social  organization  from  which  our 
political  constitution  had  sprung.  Nor  was  the  growth  of 
Parliament  the  only  cause  for  the  weakness  of  these  feudal 
restraints.  The  older  social  order  which  had  prevailed 
throughout  Western  Europe  since  the  fall  of  the  Roman 
Empire  was  now  passing  away.  The  speculation  of  the 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1540.  17 

twelfth  century,  the  scholastic  criticism  of  the  thirteenth, 
the  Lollardry  and  socialism  of  the  fourteenth  century,  had 
at  last  done  their  work.  The  spell  of  the  past,  the  spell  of 
custom  and  tradition,  which  had  enchained  the  minds  of 
men,  was  roughly  broken.  The  supremacy  of  the  warrior 
in  a  world  of  war,  the  severance  of  privileged  from  un- 
privileged classes,  no  longer  seemed  the  one  natural  struc- 
ture of  society.  The  belief  in  its  possession  of  supernatu- 
ral truths  and  supernatural  powers  no  longer  held  man  in 
unquestioning  awe  of  the  priesthood.  The  strength  of  the 
Church  was  sapped  alike  by  theological  and  moral  revolt, 
while  the  growth  of  new  classes,  the  new  greed  of  peace 
and  of  the  wealth  that  comes  of  peace,  the  advance  of  in- 
dustry, the  division  of  property,  the  progress  of  centralized 
government,  dealt  fatal  blows  at  the  feudal  organization 
of  the  state. 

Nor  was  the  danger  merely  an  external  one.  Noble  and 
priest  alike  were  beginning  to  disbelieve  in  themselves. 
The  new  knowledge  which  was  now  dawning  on  the  world, 
the  new  direct  contact  with  the  Greek  and  Roman  litera- 
tures which  was  just  beginning  to  exert  its  influence  on 
western  Europe,  told  above  all  on  these  wealthier  and  more 
refined  classes.  The  young  scholar  or  noble  who  crossed 
the  Alps  brought  from  the  schools  of  Florence  the  dim  im- 
pression of  a  republican  liberty  or  an  imperial  order  which 
disenchanted  him  of  the  world  in  which  he  found  himself. 
He  looked  on  the  feudalism  about  him  as  a  brutal  anarchy; 
he  looked  on  the  Church  itself  as  the  supplanter  of  a  nobler 
and  more  philosophic  morality.  In  England  as  elsewhere 
the  great  ecclesiastical  body  still  seemed  imposing  from 
the  memories  of  its  past,  its  immense  wealth,  its  tradition 
of  statesmanship,  its  long  association  with  the  intellectual 
and  religious  aspirations  of  men,  its  hold  on  social  life. 
But  its  real  power  was  small.  Its  moral  inertness,  its  lack 
of  spiritual  enthusiasm,  gave  it  less  and  less  hold  on  the 
religious  minds  of  the  day.  Its  energies  indeed  seemed 
absorbed  in  a  mere  clinging  to  existence.  For  in  spite  of 


18  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

steady  repression  Lollardry  still  lived  on,  no  longer  indeed 
as  an  organized  movement,  but  in  scattered  and  secret 
groups  whose  sole  bond  was  a  common  loyalty  to  the  Bible 
and  a  common  spirit  of  revolt  against  the  religion  of  their 
day.  Nine  years  after  the  accession  of  Henry  the  Sixth 
the  Duke  of  Gloucester  was  traversing  England  with  men- 
at-arms  for  the  purpose  of  repressing  the  risings  of  the  Lol- 
lards and  of  hindering  the  circulation  of  their  invectives 
against  the  clergy.  In  1449  "  Bible  men"  were  still  suffi- 
ciently formidable  to  call  a  prelate  to  the  front  as  a  con- 
troversialist :  and  the  very  title  of  Bishop  Pecock's  work, 
"A  Represser  of  overmuch  blaming  of  the  clergy,"  shows 
the  damage  done  by  their  virulent  criticism.  Its  most 
fatal  effect  was  to  rob  the  priesthood  of  moral  power. 
Taunted  with  a  love  of  wealth,  with  a  lower  standard  of 
life  than  that  of  the  ploughman  and  weaver  who  gathered 
to  read  the  Bible  by  night,  dreading  in  themselves  any 
burst  of  emotion  or  enthusiasm  as  a  possible  prelude  to 
heresy,  the  clergy  ceased  to  be  the  moral  leaders  of  the  na- 
tion. They  plunged  as  deeply  as  the  men  about  them  into 
the  darkest  superstition,  and  above  all  into  the  belief  in 
sorcery  and  magic  which  formed  so  remarkable  a  feature 
of  the  time.  It  was  for  conspiracy  with  a  priest  to  waste 
the  King's  life  by  sorcery  that  Eleanor  Cobham  did  pen- 
ance through  the  streets  of  London.  The  mist  which 
wrapped  the  battle-field  of  Barnet  was  attributed  to  the 
incantations  of  Friar  Bungay.  The  one  pure  figure  which 
rises  out  of  the  greed,  the  selfishness,  the  scepticism  of  the 
time,  the  figure  of  Joan  of  Arc,  was  looked  on  by  the  doc- 
tors and  priests  who  judged  her  as  that  of  a  sorceress. 
The  prevalence  of  such  beliefs  tells  its  own  tale  of  the  in- 
tellectual state  of  the  clergy.  They  were  ceasing  in  fact 
to  be  an  intellectual  class  art  all.  The  monasteries  were  no 
longer  seats  of  learning.  "I  find  in  them,"  says  Poggio, 
an  Italian  scholar  who  visited  England  some  twenty  years 
after  Chaucer's  death,  "men  given  up  to  sensuality  in 
abundance,  but  very  few  lovers  of  learning  and  those  of  a 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  19 

barbarous  sort,  skilled  more  in  quibbles  and  sophisms  than 
in  literature."  The  statement  is  no  doubt  colored  by  the 
contempt  of  the  new  scholars  for  the  scholastic  philosophy 
which  had  taken  the  place  of  letters  in  England  as  else- 
where, but  even  scholasticism  was  now  at  its  lowest  ebb. 
The  erection  of  colleges,  which  began  in  the  thirteenth  cen- 
tury but  made  little  progress  till  the  time  we  have  reached, 
failed  to  arrest  the  quick  decline  of  the  universities  both 
in  the  numbers  and  learning  of  their  students.  Those  at 
Oxford  amounted  to  only  a  fifth  of  the  scholars  who  had 
attended  its  lectures  a  century  before,  and  Oxford  Latin 
became  proverbial  for  a  jargon  in  which  the  very  tradition 
of  grammar  had  been  lost.  Literature,  which  had  till  now 
rested  mainly  in  the  hands  of  the  clergy,  came  almost  to 
an  end.  Of  all  its  nobler  forms  history  alone  lingered  on ; 
but  it  lingered  in  compilations  or  extracts  from  past  writ- 
ers, such  as  make  up  the  so-called  works  of  Walsingham, 
in  jejune  monastic  annals,  or  worthless  popular  compen- 
diums.  The  only  real  trace  of  mental  activity  was  seen  in 
the  numerous  treatises  which  dealt  with  alchemy  or  magic, 
the  elixir  of  life,  or  the  philosopher's  stone;  a  fungoua 
growth  which  even  more  clearly  than  the  absence  of  health- 
ier letters  witnessed  to  the  progress  of  intellectual  decay. 

Somewhat  of  their  old  independence  lingered  indeed 
among  the  lower  clergy  and  the  monastic  orders ;  it  was 
in  fact  the  successful  resistance  of  the  last  to  an  effort  made 
to  establish  arbitrary  taxation  which  brought  about  their 
ruin.  Up  to  the  terrible  statutes  of  Thomas  Cromwell  the 
clergy  in  convocation  still  asserted  boldly  their  older  rights 
against  the  Crown.  But  it  was  through  its  prelates  that 
the  Church  exercised  a  directly  political  influence,  and 
these  showed  a  different  temper  from  the  clergy.  Driven 
by  sheer  need,  by  the  attack  of  the  barons  on  their  tempo- 
ral possessions  and  of  the  Lollard  on  their  spiritual  author- 
ity, into  dependence  on  the  Crown,  their  weight  was  thrown 
into  the  scale  of  the  monarchy.  Their  weakness  told  di- 
rectly on  the  constitutional  progress  of  the  realm,  for 


20  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

through  the  diminution  in  the  number  of  the  peers  tempo- 
ral the  greater  part  of  the  House  of  Lords  was  now  com- 
posed of  spiritual  peers,  of  bishops  and  the  greater  abbots. 
The  statement  which  attributes  this  lessening  of  the  bar- 
onage to  the  Wars  of  the  Roses  seems  indeed  to  be  an  error. 
Although  Henry  the  Seventh,  in  dread  of  opposition  to  his 
throne,  summoned  only  a  portion  of  the  temporal  peers  to 
his  first  Parliament  there  were  as  many  barons  at  his  ac- 
cession as  at  the  accession  of  Henry  the  Sixth.  Of  the 
greater  houses  only  those  of  Beaufort  and  Tiptoft  were  ex- 
tinguished by  the  civil  war.  The  decline  of  the  baronage, 
the  extinction  of  the  greater  families,  the  break-up  of  the 
great  estates,  had  in  fact  been  going  on  throughout  the 
reign  of  the  Edwards;  and  it  was  after  Agincourt  that 
the  number  of  temporal  peers  sank  to  its  lowest  ebb.  From 
that  time  till  the  time  of  the  Tudors  they  numbered  but 
fifty-two.  A  reduction  in  the  numbers  of  the  baronage, 
however,  might  have  been  more  than  compensated  by  the 
concentration  of  great  estates  in  the  hands  of  the  houses 
that  survived.  What  wrecked  it  as  a  military  force  was 
the  revolution  which  was  taking  place  in  the  art  of  war. 
The  introduction  of  gunpowder  ruined  feudalism.  The 
mounted  and  heavily  armed  knight  gave  way  to  the  meaner 
footman.  Fortresses  which  had  been  impregnable  against 
the  attacks  of  the  Middle  Ages  crumbled  before  the  new 
artillery.  Although  gunpowder  had  been  in  use  as  early 
as  Cre§y  it  was  not  till  the  accession  of  the  House  of  Lan- 
caster that  it  was  really  brought  into  effective  employment 
as  a  military  resource.  But  the  revolution  in  warfare  was 
immediate.  The  wars  of  Henry  the  Fifth  were  wars  of 
sieges.  The  "Last  of  the  Barons,"  as  Warwick  has  pic- 
turesquely been  styled,  relied  mainly  on  his  train  of  artil- 
lery. It  was  artillery  that  turned  the  day  at  Barnet  and 
Tewkesbury,  and  that  gave  Henry  the  Seventh  his  victory 
over  the  formidable  dangers  which  assailed  him.  The 
strength  which  the  change  gave  to  the  Crown  was  in  fact 
almost  irresistible.  Throughout  the  Middle  Ages  the  call 


CHAP.  l.J  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  21 

of  a  great  baron  had  been  enough  to  raise  a  formidable  re- 
volt. Yeomen  and  retainers  took  down  the  bow  from  their 
chimney  corner,  knights  buckled  on  their  armor,  and  in  a 
few  days  a  host  threatened  the  throne.  Without  artillery, 
however,  such  a  force  was  now  helpless,  and  the  one  train 
of  artillery  in  the  kingdom  lay  at  the  disposal  of  the  King. 
But  a  far  greater  strength  than  guns  could  give  was 
given  to  the  monarchy  by  its  maintenance  of  order  and  by 
its  policy  of  peace.  For  two  hundred  years  England  had 
been  almost  constantly  at  war,  and  to  war  without  had 
been  added  discord  and  misrule  within.  As  the  country 
tasted  the  sweets  of  rest  and  firm  government  that  reaction 
of  feeling,  that  horror  of  fresh  civil  wars,  that  content  with 
its  own  internal  growth  and  indifference  to  foreign  aggran- 
dizement, which  distinguished  the  epoch  of  the  Tudors  be- 
gan to  assert  its  power.  The  Crown  became  identified 
with  the  thought  of  national  prosperity,  almost  with  the 
thought  of  national  existence.  Loyalty  drew  to  itself  the 
force  of  patriotism.  Devotion  to  the  Crown  became  one  in 
men's  minds  with  devotion  to  their  country.  For  almost 
a  hundred  years  England  lost  all  sense  of  a  national  indi- 
viduality ;  it  saw  itself  only  in  the  Crown.  The  tendency 
became  irresistible  as  the  nation  owned  in  the  power  of  its 
Kings  its  one  security  for  social  order,  its  one  bulwark 
against  feudal  outrage  and  popular  anarchy.  The  violence 
and  anarchy  which  had  always  clung  like  a  taint  to  the 
baronage  grew  more  and  more  unbearable  as  the  nation 
moved  forward  to  a  more  settled  peacefulness  and  industry. 
But  this  tendency  to  violence  received  a  new  impulse  from 
the  war  with  France.  Long  before  the  struggle  was  over 
it  had  done  its  fatal  work  on  the  mood  of  the  English  no- 
ble. His  aim  had  become  little  more  than  a  lust  for  gold, 
a  longing  after  plunder,  after  the  pillage  of  farms,  the  sack 
of  cities,  the  ransom  of  captives.  So  intense  was  the  greed 
of  gain  that  in  the  later  years  of  the  war  only  a  threat  of 
death  could  keep  the  fighting-men  in  their  ranks,  and  the 
results  of  victory  after  victory  were  lost  through  the  anr- 


22  HISTORY   OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

iety  of  the  conquerors  to  deposit  their  booty  and  captives 
safely  at  home.  The  moment  the  hand  of  such  leaders  as 
Henry  the  Fifth  or  Bedford  was  removed  the  war  died 
down  into  mere  massacre  and  brigandage.  "  If  God  had 
been  a  captain  nowadays, "exclaimed  a  French  general," 
"he  would  have  turned  marauder."  The  temper  thus 
nursed  on  the  fields  of  France  found  at  last  scope  for  action 
in  England  itself.  Even  before  the  outbreak  of  the  War 
of  the  Roses  the  nobles  had  become  as  lawless  and  dissolute 
at  home  as  they  were  greedy  and  cruel  abroad. 

But  with  the  struggle  of  York  and  Lancaster  and  the 
paralysis  of  government  which  it  brought  with  it,  all  hold 
over  the  baronage  was  gone;  and  the  lawlessness  and  bru- 
tality of  their  temper  showed  itself  without  a  check.  The 
disorder  which  their  violence  wrought  in  a  single  district 
of  the  country  is  brought  home  by  the  Paston  Letters,  an 
invaluable  series  of  domestic  correspondence  which  lifts 
for  us  a  corner  of  the  veil  that  hides  the  social  state  of 
England  in  the  fifteenth  century.  We  see  houses  sacked, 
judges  overawed  or  driven  from  the  bench,  peaceful  men 
hewn  down  by  assassins  or  plundered  by  armed  bands, 
women  carried  off  to  forced  marriages,  elections  controlled 
by  brute  force,  parliaments  degraded  into  camps  of  armed 
retainers.  As  the  number  of  their  actual  vassals  declined 
with  the  progress  of  enfranchisement  and  the  upgrowth 
of  the  freeholder,  the  nobles  had  found  a  substitute  for 
them  in  the  grant  of  their  "liveries,"  the  badges  of  their 
households,  to  the  smaller  gentry  and  farmers  of  their 
neighborhood,  and  this  artificial  revival  of  the  dying  feu- 
dalism became  one  of  the  curses  of  the  day.  The  outlaw, 
the  broken  soldier  returning  penniless  from  the  wars,  found 
shelter  and  wages  in  the  train  of  the  greater  barons,  and 
furnished  them  with  a  force  ready  at  any  moment  for  vio- 
lence or  civil  strife.  The  same  motives  which  brought  the 
freeman  of  the  tenth  century  to  commend  himself  to  thegn 
or  baron  forced  the  yeoman  or  smaller  gentleman  of  the 
fifteenth  to  don  the  cognizance  of  his  powerful  neighbor, 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  23 

and  to  ask  for  a  grant  of  "  livery"  which  would  secure  him 
aid  and  patronage  in  fray  or  suit.  For  to  meddle  with 
such  a  retainer  was  perilous  even  for  sheriff  or  judge ;  and 
the  force  which  a  noble  could  summon  at  his  call  sufficed 
to  overawe  a  law-court  or  to  drag  a  culprit  from  prison  or 
dock.  The  evils  of  this  system  of  "maintenance"  as  it 
was  called  had  been  felt  long  before  the  Wars  of  the  Roses ; 
and  statutes  both  of  Edward  the  First  and  of  Richard  the 
Second  had  been  aimed  against  it.  But  it  was  in  the  civil 
war  that  it  showed  itself  in  its  full  force.  The  weakness 
of  the  crown  and  the  strife  of  political  factions  for  suprem- 
acy left  the  nobles  masters  of  the  field;  and  the  white  rose 
of  the  House  of  York,  the  red  rose  of  the  House  of  Lan- 
caster, the  portcullis  of  the  Beauforts,  the  pied  bull  of  the 
Nevilles,  the  bear  and  ragged  staff  which  Warwick  bor- 
rowed from  the  Beauchamps,  were  seen  on  hundreds  of 
breasts  in  Parliament  or  on  the  battle-field. 

The  lawlessness  of  the  baronage  tended  as  it  had  always 
tended  to  the  profit  of  the  crown  by  driving  the  people  at 
large  to  seek  for  order  and  protection  at  the  hands  of  the 
monarchy.  And  at  this  moment  the  craving  for  such  a 
protection  was  strengthened  by  the  general  growth  of 
wealth  and  industry.  The  smaller  proprietors  of  the  coun- 
ties were  growing  fast  both  in  wealth  and  numbers,  while 
the  burgess  class  in  the  cities  were  drawing  fresh  riches 
from  the  development  of  trade  which  characterized  this 
period.  The  noble  himself  owed  his  importance  to  his 
wealth.  Poggio,  as  he  wandered  through  the  island,  noted 
that  "  the  noble  who  has  the  greatest  revenue  is  most  re- 
spected ;  and  that  even  men  of  gentle  blood  attend  to  coun- 
try business  and  sell  their  wool  and  cattle,  not  thinking 
it  any  disparagement  to  engage  in  rural  industry."  Slowly 
but  surely  the  foreign  commerce  of  the  country,  hitherto 
conducted  by  the  Italian,  the  Hanse  merchant,  or  the  trader 
of  Catalonia  or  southern  Gaul,  was  passing  into  English 
hands.  English  merchants  were  settled  at  Florence  and 
at  Venice.  English  merchant  ships  appeared  in  the  Bal- 


24  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

tic.  The  first  faint  upgrowth  of  manufactures  was  seen 
in  a  crowd  of  protective  statutes  which  formed  a  marked 
feature  in  the  legislation  of  Edward  the  Fourth.  The 
weight  which  the  industrial  classes  had  acquired  was  seen 
in  the  bounds  which  their  opinion  set  to  the  Wars  of  the 
Roses.  England  presented  to  Philippe  de  Commines  the 
rare  spectacle  of  a  land  where,  brutal  as  was  its  civil  strife, 
"  there  are  no  buildings  destroyed  or  demolished  by  war, 
and  where  the  mischief  of  it  falls  on  those  who  make  the 
war."  The  ruin  and  bloodshed  were  limited  in  fact  to  the 
great  lords  and  their  feudal  retainers.  If  the  towns  once 
or  twice  threw  themselves,  as  at  Towton,  into  the  strug- 
gle, the  trading  and  agricultural  classes  for  the  most  part 
stood  wholly  apart  from  it.  While  the  baronage  was  dash- 
ing itself  to  pieces  in  battle  after  battle  justice  went  on 
undisturbed.  The  law  courts  sat  at  Westminster.  The 
judges  rode  on  circuit  as  of  old.  The  system  of  jury  trial 
took  more  and  more  its  modern  form  by  the  separation  of 
the  jurors  from  the  witnesses.  But  beneath  this  outer 
order  and  prosperity  a  social  revolution  was  beginning 
which  tended  as  strongly  as  the  outrages  of  the  baronage 
to  the  profit  of  the  crown.  The  rise  in  the  price  of  wool 
was  giving  a  fresh  impulse  to  the  changes  in  agriculture 
which  had  begun  with  the  Black  Death  and  were  to  go 
steadily  on  for  a  hundred  years  to  come.  These  changes 
were  the  throwing  together  of  the  smaller  holdings,  and 
the  introduction  of  sheep-farming,  on  an  enormous  scale. 
The  new  wealth  of  the  merchant  classes  helped  on  the 
change.  They  began  to  invest  largely  in  land,  and  these 
"farming  gentlemen  and  clerking  knights,"  as  Latimer 
bitterly  styled  them,  were  restrained  by  few  traditions  or 
associations  in  their  eviction  of  the  smaller  tenants.  The 
land  indeed  had  been  greatly  underlet,  and  as  its  value  rose 
with  the  peace  and  firm  government  of  the  early  Tudors 
the  temptation  to  raise  the  customary  rents  became  irre- 
sistible. "  That  which  went  heretofore  for  twenty  or  forty 
pounds  a  year,"  we  learn  in  Henry  the  Eighth's  day,  "now 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONAECHY.    1461-1540.  25 

is  let  for  fifty  or  a  hundred."  But  it  had  been  only  by 
this  low  scale  of  rent  that  the  small  yeomanry  class  had 
been  enabled  to  exist.  "My  father,"  says  Latimer,  "was 
a  yeoman,  and  had  no  lands  of  his  own ;  only  he  had  a 
farm  of  three  or  four  pounds  by  the  year  at  the  uttermost, 
and  hereupon  he  tilled  so  much  as  kept  half-a-dozen  men. 
He  had  walk  for  a  hundred  sheep,  and  my  mother  milked 
thirty  kine;  he  was  able  and  did  find  the  King  a  harness 
with  himself  and  his  horse  while  he  came  to  the  place  that 
he  should  receive  the  King's  wages.  I  can  remember  that 
I  buckled  his  harness  when  he  went  to  Blackheath  Field. 
He  kept  me  to  school :  he  married  my  sisters  with  five 
pounds  apiece,  so  that  he  brought  them  up  in  godliness 
and  fear  of  God.  He  kept  hospitality  for  his  poor  neigh- 
bors, and  some  alms  he  gave  to  the  poor,  and  all  this  he 
did  of  the  same  farm,  where  he  that  now  hath  it  payeth 
sixteen  pounds  by  year  or  more,  and  is  not  able  to  do  any- 
thing for  his  prince,  for  himself,  nor  for  his  children,  or 
give  a  cup  of  drink  to  the  poor." 

Increase  of  rent  ended  with  such  tenants  in  the  relin- 
quishment  of  their  holdings,  but  the  bitterness  of  the  ejec- 
tions which  the  new  system  of  cultivation  necessitated  was 
increased  by  the  iniquitous  means  that  were  often  employed 
to  bring  them  about.  The  farmers,  if  we  believe  More  in 
1515,  were  "got  rid  of  either  by  fraud  or  force,  or  tired 
out  with  repeated  wrongs  into  parting  with  their  property." 
"  In  this  way  it  comes  to  pass  that  these  poor  wretches, 
men,  women,  husbands,  orphans,  widows,  parents  with 
little  children,  households  greater  in  number  than  in  wealth 
(for  arable  fanning  requires  many  hands,  while  one  shep- 
herd and  herdsman  will  suffice  for  a  pasture  farm),  all 
these  emigrate  from  their  native  fields  without  knowing 
where  to  go."  The  sale  of  their  scanty  household  stuff 
drove  them  to  wander  homeless  abroad,  to  be  thrown  into 
prison  as  vagabonds,  to  beg  and  to  steal.  Yet  in  the  face 
of  such  a  spectacle  as  this  we  still  find  the  old  complaint 
of  scarcity  of  labor,  and  the  old  legal  remedy  for  it  in  a 


26  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

fixed  scale  of  wages.  The  social  disorder,  in  fact,  baffled 
the  sagacity  of  English  statesmen,  and  they  could  find  no 
better  remedy  for  it  than  laws  against  the  further  exten- 
sion of  sheep-farms,  and  a  formidable  increase  of  public 
executions.  Both  were  alike  fruitless.  Enclosures  and 
evictions  went  on  as  before  and  swelled  the  numbers  and 
the  turbulence  of  the  floating  labor  class.  The  riots  against 
"enclosures,"  of  which  we  first  hear  in  the  time  of  Henry 
the  Sixth  and  which  became  a  constant  feature  of  the  Tudor 
period,  are  indications  not  only  of  a  perpetual  strife  going 
on  in  every  quarter  between  the  landowners  and  the  smaller 
peasant  class,  but  of  a  mass  of  social  discontent  which  was 
to  seek  constant  outlets  in  violence  and  revolution.  And 
into  this  mass  of  disorder  the  break-up  of  the  military 
households  and  the  return  of  wounded  and  disabled  soldiers 
from  the  wars  introduced  a  dangerous  leaven  of  outrage 
and  crime.  England  for  the  first  time  saw  a  distinct 
criminal  class  in  the  organized  gangs  of  robbers  which  be- 
gan to  infest  the  roads  and  were  always  ready  to  gather 
round  the  standard  of  revolt.  The  gallows  did  their  work 
in  vain.  "  If  you  do  not  remedy  the  evils  which  produce 
thieves,"  More  urged  with  bitter  truth,  "the  rigorous  ex- 
ecution of  justice  in  punishing  thieves  will  be  vain."  But 
even  More  could  only  suggest  a  remedy  which,  efficacious 
as  it  was  subsequently  to  prove,  had  yet  to  wait  a  century 
for  its  realization.  "  Let  the  woollen  manufacture  be  in- 
troduced, so  that  honest  employment  may  be  found  for 
those  whom  want  has  made  thieves  or  will  make  thieves 
ere  long."  The  extension  of  industry  at  last  succeeded  in 
absorbing  this  mass  of  surplus  labor,  but  the  process  was 
not  complete  till  the  close  of  Elizabeth's  day,  and  through- 
out the  time  of  the  Tudors  the  discontent  of  the  labor  class 
bound  the  wealthier  classes  to  the  crown.  It  was  in  truth 
this  social  danger  which  lay  at  the  root  of  the  Tudor  des- 
potism. For  the  proprietary  classes  the  repression  of  the 
poor  was  a  question  of  life  and  death.  Employer  and  pro- 
prietor were  ready  to  surrender  freedom  into  the  hands  of 


CHAP.  l.J  THE  MONARCHY.    1461—1540.  *7 

the  one  power  which  could  preserve  them  from  social  an- 
archy. It  was  to  the  selfish  panic  of  the  landowners  that 
England  owed  the  Statute  of  Laborers  and  its  terrible 
heritage  of  pauperism.  It  was  to  the  selfish  panic  of  both 
landowner  and  merchant  that  she  owed  the  despotism  of 
the  Monarchy. 

The  most  fatal  effect  of  this  panic,  of  this  passion  for 
"order,"  was  seen  in  the  striving  of  these  classes  after 
special  privileges  which  the  Crown  alone  could  bestow. 
Even  before  the  outbreak  of  the  civil  war  this  tendency 
toward  privilege  had  produced  important  constitutional  re- 
sults. The  character  of  the  House  of  Commons  had  been 
changed  by  the  restriction  of  both  the  borough  and  the 
county  franchise.  Up  to  this  time  all  freemen  settling  in 
a  borough  and  paying  their  dues  to  it  became  by  the  mere 
fact  of  settlement  its  burgesses.  But  during  the  reign  of 
Henry  the  Sixth  and  still  more  under  Edward  the  Fourth 
this  largeness  of  borough  life  was  roughly  curtailed.  The 
trade  companies  which  vindicated  civic  freedom  from  the 
tyranny  of  the  older  merchant  guilds  themselves  tended  to 
become  a  narrow  and  exclusive  oligarchy.  Most  of  the 
boroughs  had  by  this  time  acquired  civic  property,  and  it 
was  with  the  aim  of  securing  their  own  enjoyment  of  this 
against  any  share  of  it  by  "  strangers"  that  the  existing 
burgesses  for  the  most  part  procured  charters  of  incorpora- 
tion from  the  Crown,  which  turned  them  into  a  close  body 
and  excluded  from  their  number  all  who  were  not  burgesses 
by  birth  or  who  failed  henceforth  to  purchase  their  right 
of  entrance  by  a  long  apprenticeship.  In  addition  to  this 
narrowing  of  the  burgess-body  the  internal  government  of 
the  boroughs  had  almost  universally  passed  since  the  fail- 
ure of  the  Communal  movement  in  the  thirteenth  century 
from  the  free  gathering  of  the  citizens  in  borough-mote 
into  the  hands  of  Common  Councils,  either  self -elected  or 
elected  by  the  wealthier  burgesses ;  and  to  these  councils, 
or  to  a  yet  more  restricted  number  of  "  select  men"  belong- 
ing to  them,  clauses  in  the  new  charters  generally  confined 


28  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

the  right  of  choosing  their  representatives  in  Parliament. 
It  was  with  this  restriction  that  the  long  process  of  degra- 
dation began  which  ended  in  reducing  the  representation 
of  our  boroughs  to  a  mere  mockery.  Influences  which 
would  have  had  small  weight  over  the  town  at  large  proved 
irresistible  by  the  small  body  of  corporators  or  "select 
men."  Great  nobles,  neighboring  landowners,  the  Crown 
itself,  seized  on  the  boroughs  as  their  prey,  and  dictated 
the  choice  of  their  representatives.  Corruption  did  what- 
ever force  failed  to  do :  and  from  the  Wars  of  the  Roses  to 
the  days  of  Pitt  the  voice  of  the  people  had  to  be  looked 
for  not  in  the  members  for  the  towns  but  in  the  knights 
for  the  counties. 

The  restriction  of  the  county  franchise  on  the  other  hand 
was  the  direct  work  of  the  Parliament  itself.  Economic 
changes  were  fast  widening  the  franchise  in  the  shires. 
The  number  of  freeholders  increased  with  the  subdivision 
of  estates  and  the  social  changes  which  we  have  already 
noticed.  But  this  increase  of  independence  was  marked 
by  "  riots  and  divisions  between  the  gentlemen  and  other 
people"  which  the  statesmen  of  the  day  attributed  to  the 
excessive  number  of  voters.  In  many  counties  the  power 
of  the  great  lords  undoubtedly  enabled  them  to  control 
elections  through  the  number  of  their  retainers.  In  Cade's 
revolt  the  Kentishmen  complained  that  "  the  people  of  the 
shire  are  not  allowed  to  have  their  free  elections  in  the 
choosing  of  knights  for  the  shire,  but  letters  have  been  sent 
from  divers  estates  to  the  great  nobles  of  the  county,  the 
which  enforceth  their  tenants  and  other  people  by  force  tc 
choose  other  persons  than  the  common  will  is."  It  was 
primarily  to  check  this  abuse  that  a  statute  of  the  reign  of 
Henry  the  Sixth  restricted  in  1430  the  right  of  voting  in 
shires  to  freeholders  holding  land  worth  forty  shillings, 
a  sum  equal  in  our  money  to  at  least  twenty  pounds  a  year 
and  representing  a  far  higher  proportional  income  at  the 
present  time.  Whatever  its  original  purpose  may  have 
been,  the  result  of  the  statute  was  a  wide  disfranchise- 


CHAP.  I.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  29 

ment.  It  was  aimed,  in  its  own  words,  against  voters  "  of 
no  value,  whereof  every  of  them  pretended  to  have  a  voice 
equivalent  with  the  more  worthy  knights  and  esquires 
dwelling  in  the  same  counties."  But  in  actual  working 
the  statute  was  interpreted  in  a  more  destructive  fashion 
than  its  words  were  intended  to  convey.  Up  to  this  time 
all  suitors  who  attended  at  the  Sheriff's  Court  had  voted 
without  question  for  the  Knight  of  the  Shire,  but  by  the 
new  statute  the  great .  bulk  of  the  existing  voters,  every 
leaseholder  and  every  copyholder,  found  themselves  im- 
plicitly deprived  of  their  franchise. 

The  restriction  of  the  suffrage  was  the  main  cause  that 
broke  the  growing  strength  of  the  House  of  Commons. 
The  ruin  of  the  baronage,  the  weakness  of  the  prelacy, 
broke  that  of  the  House  of  Lords.  The  power  of  the  Par- 
liament died  down  therefore  at  the  very  moment  when  the 
cessation  of  war,  the  opening  of  new  sources  of  revenue, 
the  cry  for  protection  against  social  anarchy,  doubled  the 
strength  of  the  Crown.  A  change  passed  over  the  spirit 
of  English  government  which  was  little  short  of  a  revolu- 
tion. The  change,  however,  was  a  slow  and  gradual  one. 
It  is  with  the  victory  of  Towton  that  the  new  power  of 
the  Monarchy  begins,  but  in  the  years  that  immediately 
followed  this  victory  there  was  little  to  promise  the  tri- 
umph of  the  Crown.  The  King,  Edward  the  Fourth,  waa 
but  a  boy  of  nineteen ;  and  decisive  as  his  march  upon 
London  proved,  he  had  as  yet  given  few  signs  of  political 
ability.  His  luxurious  temper  showed  itself  in  the  pomp 
and  gayety  of  his  court,  in  feast  and  tourney,  or  in  love- 
passages  with  city  wives  and  noble  ladies.  The  work  of 
government,  the  defence  of  the  new  throne  against  its 
restless  foes,  he  left  as  yet  to  sterner  hands.  Among  the 
few  great  houses  who  recalled  the  might  of  the  older  bar- 
onage two  families  of  the  northern  border  stood  first  in 
power  and  repute.  The  Percies  had  played  the  chief  part 
in  the  revolution  which  gave  the  crown  to  the  House  of 
Lancaster.  Their  rivals,  the  Nevilles,  had  set  the  line  of 


30  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       JBoOK  V. 

York  on  the  throne.  Fortune  seemed  to  delight  in  adding 
lands  and  wealth  to  the  last  powerful  family.  The  heiress 
of  the  Montacutes  brought  the  Earldom  of  Salisbury  and 
the  barony  of  Monthermer  to  a  second  son  of  their  chief, 
the  Earl  of  Westmoreland ;  and  Salisbury's  son,  Richard 
Neville,  won  the  Earldom  of  Warwick  with  the  hand  of 
the  heiress  of  the  Beauchamps.  The  ruin  of  the  Percies, 
whose  lands  and  Earldom  of  Northumberland  were  granted 
to  Warwick's  brother,  raised  the  -Nevilles  to  unrivalled 
greatness  in  the  land.  Warwick,  who  on  his  father's 
death  added  the  Earldom  of  Salisbury  to  his  earlier  titles, 
had  like  his  father  warmly  espoused  the  cause  of  Richard 
of  York,  and  it  was  to  his  counsels  that  men  ascribed  the 
decisive  step  by  which  his  cousin  Edward  of  March  as- 
sumed the  crown.  From  St.  Albans  to  Towton  he  had 
been  the  foremost  among  the  assailants  of  the  Lancastrian 
line ;  and  the  death  of  his  uncle  and  father,  the  youth  of 
the  King,  and  the  glory  of  the  great  victory  which  con- 
firmed his  throne,  placed  the  Earl  at  the  head  of  the  York- 
ist party. 

Warwick's  services  were  munificently  rewarded  by  a 
grant  of  vast  estates  from  the  confiscated  lands  of  the 
Lancastrian  baronage,  and  by  his  elevation  to  the  highest 
posts  in  the  service  of  the  State.  He  was  Captain  of 
Calais,  admiral  of  the  fleet  in  the  Channel,  and  Warden 
of  the  Western  Marches.  The  command  of  the  northern 
border  lay  in  the  lands  of  his  brother,  Lord  Montagu,  who 
received  as  his  share  of  the  spoil  the  forfeited  Earldom  of 
Northumberland  and  the  estates  of  his  hereditary  rivals, 
the  Percies.  A  younger  brother,  George  Neville,  was 
raised  to  the  See  of  York  and  the  post  of  Lord  Chancellor. 
Lesser  rewards  fell  to  Warwick's  uncles,  the  minor  chiefs 
of  the  House  of  Neville,  Lords  Falconberg,  Abergavenny, 
and  Latimer.  The  vast  power  which  such  an  accumula- 
tion of  wealth  and  honors  placed  at  the  Earl's  disposal 
was  wielded  with  consummate  ability.  In  outer  seeming 
Warwick  was  the  very  type  of  the  feudal  baron.  He 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1540.  bl 

could  raise  armies  at  his  call  from  his  own  earldoms.  Six 
hundred  lireried  retainers  followed  him  to  Parliament. 
Thousands  of  dependants  feasted  in  his  court-yard.  But 
few  men  w^re  really  further  from  the  feudal  ideal.  Active 
and  ruthless  warrior  as  he  was,  his  enemies  denied  to 
the  Earl  the  gift  of  personal  daring.  In  war  he  showed 
himself  more  general  than  soldier,  and  in  spite  of  a  series 
of  victories  his  genius  was  not  so  much  military  as  dip- 
lomatic. A  Burgundian  chronicler  who  knew  him  well 
describes  him  as  the  craftiest  man  of  his  day,  "leplus 
soubtil  homme  de  son  vivant."  Secret,  patient,  without 
faith  or  loyalty,  ruthless,  unscrupulous,  what  Warwick 
excelled  in  was  intrigue,  treachery,  the  contrivance  of 
plots,  and  sudden  desertions. 

His  temper  brought  out  in  terrible  relief  the  moral  dis- 
organization of  the  time.  The  old  order  of  the  world  was 
passing  away.  Since  the  fall  of  the  Roman  Empire  civil 
society  had  been  held  together  by  the  power  of  the  given 
word,  by  the  "  fealty"  and  "  loyalty"  that  bound  vassal  to 
lord  and  lord  to  king.  A  common  faith  in  its  possession 
of  supernatural  truths  and  supernatural  powers  had  bound 
men  together  in  the  religious  society  which  knew  itself 
as  the  Church.  But  the  spell  of  religious  belief  was  now 
broken  and  the  feudal  conception  of  society  was  passing 
away.  On  the  other  hand  the  individual  sense  of  personal 
duty,  the  political  consciousness  of  each  citizen  that  na- 
tional order  and  national  welfare  are  essential  to  his  own 
well-being,  had  not  yet  come.  The  bonds  which  had  held 
the  world  together  through  so  many  ages  loosened  and 
broke  only  to  leave  man  face  to  face  with  his  own  selfish- 
ness. The  motives  that  sway  and  ennoble  the  common 
conduct  of  men  were  powerless  over  the  ruling  classes. 
Pope  and  king,  bishop  and  noble,  vied  with  each  other 
in  greed,  in  self-seeking,  in  lust,  in  faithlessness,  in  a 
pitiless  cruelty.  It  is  this  moral  degradation  that  flings 
BO  dark  a  shade  over  the  Wars  of  the  Roses.  From  no 
period  in  our  annals  do  we  turn  with  such  weariness  and 


32  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

disgust.  Their  savage  battles,  their  ruthless  executions, 
their  shameless  treasons,  seem  all  the  more  terrible  from 
the  pure  selfishness  of  the  ends  for  which  men  fought,  for 
the  utter  want  of  all  nobleness  and  chivalry  in  the  contest 
itself,  of  all  great  result  in  its  close.  And  it  is  this  moral 
disorganization  that  expresses  itself  in  the  men  whom  the 
civil  war  left  behind  it.  Of  honor,  of  loyalty,  of  good 
faith,  Warwick  knew  nothing.  He  had  fought  for  the 
House  of  Neville  rather  than  for  the  House  of  York,  had 
set  Edward  on  the  throne  as  a  puppet  whom  he  could  rule 
at  his  will,  and  his  policy  seemed  to  have  gained  its  end 
in  leaving  the  Earl  master  of  the  realm. 

In  the  three  years  which  followed  Towton  the  power  of 
the  Nevilles  overshadowed  that  of  the  King.  It  was 
Warwick  who  crushed  a  new  rising  which  Margaret 
brought  about  by  a  landing  in  the  north,  and  who  drove 
the  queen  and  her  child  over  the  Scotch  border.  It  was 
his  brother,  Lord  Montagu,  who  suppressed  a  new  revolt 
in  1464.  The  defeat  of  this  rising  in  the  battle  of  Hexham 
seemed  to  bring  the  miserable  war  to  a  close,  for  after 
some  helpless  wanderings  Henry  the  Sixth  was  betrayed 
into  the  hands  of  his  enemies  and  brought  in  triumph  to 
London.  His  feet  were  tied  to  the  stirrups,  he  was  led 
thrice  round  the  pillory,  and  then  sent  as  a  prisoner  to 
the  Tower.  Warwick  was  now  all-powerful  in  the  State, 
but  the  cessation  of  the  war  was  the  signal  for  a  silent 
strife  between  the  Earl  and  his  young  sovereign.  In  Ed- 
ward indeed  Warwick  was  to  meet  not  only  a  consum- 
mate general  but  a  politician  whose  subtlety  and  rapidity 
of  conception  were  far  above  his  own.  As  a  mere  boy 
Edward  had  shown  himself  among  the  ablest  and  the  most 
pitiless  of  the  warriors  of  the  civil  war.  He  had  looked 
on  with  cool  ruthlessness  while  gray-haired  nobles  were 
hurried  to  the  block.  The  terrible  bloodshed  of  Towton 
woke  no  pity  in  his  heart;  he  turned  from  it  only  to  frame 
a  vast  bill  of  attainder  which  drove  twelve  great  nobles 
and  a  hundred  knights  to  beggary  and  exile.  When 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461—1540.  33 

treachery  placed  his  harmless  rival  in  his  power  he  visited 
him  with  cruel  insult.  His  military  ability  had  been  dis- 
played in  his  rapid  march  upon  London,  the  fierce  blow 
which  freed  him  from  his  enemy  in  the  rear,  the  decisive 
victory  at  Towton.  But  his  political  ability  was  slower 
in  developing  itself.  In  his  earliest  years  he  showed  little 
taste  for  the  work  of  rule.  While  Warwick  was  winning 
triumphs  on  battle-field  after  battle-field,  the  young  King 
seemed  to  abandon  himself  to  a  voluptuous  indolence,  to 
revels  with  the  city  wives  of  London,  and  to  the  caresses 
of  mistresses  like  Jane  Shore.  Tall  in  stature  and  of  sin- 
gular beauty,  his  winning  manners  and  gay  carelessness 
of  bearing  secured  Edward  a  popularity  which  had  been 
denied  to  nobler  kings.  When  he  asked  a  rich  old  lady 
for  ten  pounds  toward  a  war  with  France,  she  answered, 
"For  thy  comely  face  thou  shalt  have  twenty."  The 
King  thanked  and  kissed  her,  and  the  old  woman  made 
her  twenty  forty.  In  outer  appearance  indeed  no  one 
could  contrast  more  utterly  with  the  subtle  sovereigns  of 
his  time,  with  the  mean-visaged  Lewis  of  France  or  the 
meanly  clad  Ferdinand  of  Aragon.  But  Edward's  work 
was  the  same  as  theirs  and  it  was  done  as  completely. 
While  jesting  with  aldermen,  or  dallying  with  mistresses, 
or  idling  over  new  pages  from  the  printing-press  at  West- 
minster, Edward  was  silently  laying  the  foundations  of  an 
absolute  rule. 

The  very  faults  of  his  nature  helped  him  to  success. 
His  pleasure-loving  and  self-  indulgent  temper  needed  the 
pressure  of  emergency,  of  actual  danger,  to  flash  out  into 
action.  Men  like  Commines  who  saw  him  only  in  mo- 
ments of  security  and  indolence  scorned  Edward  as  dull, 
sensual,  easy  to  be  led  and  gulled  by  keener  wits.  It  was 
in  the  hour  of  need  and  despair  that  his  genius  showed  it- 
self, cool,  rapid,  subtle,  utterly  fearless,  moving  straight 
to  its  aim  through  clouds  of  treachery  and  intrigue,  and 
striking  hard  when  its  aim  was  reached.  But  even  in  his 
idler  hours  his  purpose  never  wavered.  His  indolence  and 


34  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       '[BOOK  V. 

gayety  were  in  fact  mere  veils  thrown  over  a  will  of  steel. 
From  the  first  his  aim  was  to  free  the  Crown  from  the 
control  of  the  baronage.  He  made  no  secret  of  his  hos- 
tility to  the  nobles.  At  Towton  as  in  all  his  after  battles 
he  bade  his  followers  slay  knight  and  baron,  but  spare  the 
commons.  In  his  earliest  Parliament,  that  of  1461,  he 
renewed  the  statutes  against  giving  of  liveries,  and  though 
this  enactment  proved  as  fruitless  as  its  predecessors  to 
reduce  the  households  of  the  baronage  it  marked  Edward's 
resolve  to  adhere  to  the  invariable  policy  of  the  Crown  in 
striving  for  their  reduction.  But  efforts  like  these,  though 
they  indicated"  the  young  King's  policy,  could  produce  little 
effect  so  long  as  the  mightiest  of  the  barons  overawed  the 
throne.  Yet  even  a  king  as  bold  as  Edward  might  well 
have  shrunk  from  a  struggle  with  Warwick.  The  Earl 
was  all  powerful  in  the  state;  the  military  resources  of 
the  realm  were  in  his  hands.  As  captain  of  Calais  he  was 
master  of  the  one  disciplined  force  at  the  disposal  of  the 
Crown,  and  as  admiral  he  controlled  the  royal  fleet.  The 
forces  he  drew  from  his  wide  possessions,  from  his  vast 
wealth  (for  his  official  revenues  alone  were  estimated  at 
eighty  thousand  crowns  a  year),  from  his  warlike  renown 
and  his  wide  kinship,  were  backed  by  his  personal  popu- 
larity. Above  all  the  Yorkist  party,  bound  to  Warwick 
by  a  long  series  of  victories,  looked  on  him  rather  than  on 
the  young  and  untried  King  as  its  head.  Even  Edward 
was  forced  to  delay  any  break  with  the  Earl  till  the  des- 
perate struggle  of  Margaret  was  over.  It  was  only  after 
her  defeat  at  Hexham  and  the  capture  of  Henry  that  the 
King  saw  himself  free  for  a  strife  with  the  great  soldier 
who  overawed  the  throne. 

The  policy  of  Warwick  pointed  to  a  close  alliance  with 
France.  The  Hundred  Years'  War,  though  it  had  driven 
the  English  from  Guienne  and  the  South,  had  left  the 
French  Monarchy  hemmed  in  by  great  feudatories  on  every 
other  border.  Brittany  was  almost  independent  in  the 
west.  On  the  east  the  house  of  Anjou  lay,  restless  and 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  95 

ambitious,  in  Lorraine  and  Provence,  while  the  house  of 
Burgundy  occupied  its  hereditary  duchy  and  Franche 
Comte.  On  the  northern  frontier  the  same  Burgundian 
house  was  massing  together  into  a  single  state  nearly  all 
the  crowd  of  counties,  marquisates,  and  dukedoms  which 
now  make  up  Holland  and  Belgium.  Nobles  hardly  less 
powerful  or  more  dependent  on  the  Crown  held  the  central 
provinces  of  the  kingdom  when  Lewis  the  Eleventh 
mounted  its  throne  but  a  few  months  after  Edward's  ac- 
cession. The  temper  of  the  new  King  drove  him  to  a  strife 
for  the  mastery  of  his  realm,  and  his  efforts  after  central- 
ization and  a  more  effective  rule  soon  goaded  the  baronage 
into  a  mode  of  revolt.  But  Lewis  saw  well  that  a  struggle 
with  it  was  only  possible  if  England  stood  aloof.  His 
father's  cool  sagacity  had  planned  the  securing  of  his  con- 
quests by  the  marriage  of  Lewis  himself  to  an  English 
wife,  and  though  this  project  had  fallen  through,  and  the 
civil  wars  had  given  safety  to  Prance  to  the  end  of 
Charles'  reign,  the  ruin  of  the  Lancastrian  cause  at  Tow- 
ton  again  roused  the  danger  of  attack  from  England  at  the 
moment  when  Lewis  mounted  the  throne.  Its  young  and 
warlike  King,  the  great  baron  who  was  still  fresh  from 
the  glory  of  Towton,  might  well  resolve  to  win  back  the 
heritage  of  Eleanor,  that  Duchy  of  Guienne  which  had 
been  lost  but  some  ten  years  before.  Even  if  such  an 
effort  proved  fruitless,  Lewis  saw  that  an  English  war 
would  not  only  ruin  his  plans  for  the  overthrow  of  the 
nobles,  but  would  leave  him  more  than  ever  at  their  mercy. 
Above  all  it  would  throw  him  helplessly  into  the  hands  of 
the  Burgundian  Duke.  In  the  new  struggle  as  in  the  old 
the  friendship  of  Burgundy  could  alone  bring  a  favorable 
issue,  and  such  a  friendship  would  have  to  be  paid  for  by 
sacrifices  even  more  terrible  than  those  which  had  been 
wrenched  from  the  need  of  Charles  the  Seventh.  The 
passing  of  Burgundy  from  the  side  of  England  to  the  side 
of  France  after  the  Treaty  of  Arras  had  been  bought  by 
the  cession  to  its  Duke  of  the  towns  along  the  Somme,  of 


36  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

that  Picardy  which  brought  the  Burgundian  frontier  to 
some  fifty  miles  from  Paris.  Sacrifices  even  more  costly 
would  have  to  buy  the  aid  of  Burgundy  in  a  struggle  with 
Edward  the  Fourth. 

How  vivid  was  his  sense  of  these  dangers  was  seen  in 
the  eagerness  of  Lewis  to  get  the  truce  with  England  re- 
newed and  extended.  But  his  efforts  for  a  general  peace 
broke  down  before  the  demands  of  the  English  council  for 
the  restoration  of  Normandy  and  Guienne.  Nor  were  his 
difficulties  from  England  alone.  An  English  alliance  was 
unpopular  in  France  itself.  "  Seek  no  friendship  from  the 
English,  Sire!"  said  Pierre  de  Breze,  the  Seneschal  of 
Normandy,  "for  the  more  they  love  you,  the  more  all 
Frenchmen  will  hate  you  I"  All  Lewis  could  do  was  to 
fetter  Edward's  action  by  giving  him  work  at  home. 
When  Margaret  appealed  to  him  for  aid  after  Towton  he 
refused  any  formal  help,  but  her  pledge  to  surrender 
Calais  in  case  of  success  drew  from  him  some  succor  in 
money  and  men  which  enabled  the  Queen  to  renew  the 
struggle  in  the  north.  Though  her  effort  failed,  the  hint 
so  roughly  given  had  been  enough  to  change  the  mood  of 
the  English  statesmen;  the  truce  with  France  was  re- 
newed, and  a  different  reception  met  the  new  proposals  of 
alliance  which  followed  it.  Lewis  indeed  was  now  busy 
with  an  even  more  pressing  danger.  In  any  struggle  of 
the  King  with  England  or  the  nobles  what  gave  Burgundy 
its  chief  weight  was  the  possession  of  the  towns  on  the 
Somme,  and  it  was  his  consciousness  of  the  vital  impor- 
tance of  these  to  his  throne  that  spurred  Lewis  to  the  bold 
and  dextrous  diplomacy  by  which  Duke  Philip  the  Good, 
under  the  influence  of  counsellors  who  looked  to  the  French 
King  for  protection  against  the  Duke's  son,  Charles  of 
Charolais,  was  brought  to  surrender  Picardy  on  payment 
of  the  sum  stipulated  for  its  ransom  in  the  Treaty  of  Arras. 
The  formal  surrender  of  the  towns  on  the  Somme  took 
place  in  October,  1463,  but  they  were  hardly  his  own  when 
Lewis  turned  to  press  his  alliance  upon  England.  From 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  37 

Picardy,  where  he  was  busy  in  securing  his  newly-won 
possessions,  he  sought  an  interview  with  Warwick.  His 
danger  indeed  was  still  great ;  for  the  irritated  nobles  were 
already  drawing  together  into  a  League  of  the  Public 
Weal,  and  Charles  of  Charolais,  indignant  at  the  coun- 
sellors who  severed  him  from  his  father  and  at  the  King 
who  traded  through  them  on  the  Duke's  dotage,  was  eager 
to  place  himself  at  its  head.  But  these  counsellors,  the 
Croys,  saw  their  own  ruin  as  well  as  the  ruin  of  Lewis  in 
the  success  of  a  league  of  which  Charles  was  the  head ; 
and  at  their  instigation  Duke  Philip  busied  himself  at  the 
opening  of  1464  as  the  mediator  of  an  alliance  which  would 
secure  Lewis  against  it,  a  triple  alliance  between  Bur- 
gundy and  the  French  and  English  Kings. 

Such  an  alliance  had  now  become  Warwick's  settled 
policy.  In  it  lay  the  certainty  of  peace  at  home  as  abroad, 
the  assurance  of  security  to  the  throne  which  he  had  built 
up.  While  Margaret  of  Anjou  could  look  for  aid  from 
France  the  house  of  York  could  hope  for  no  cessation  of 
the  civil  war.  A  union  between  France,  Burgundy  and 
England  left  the  partisans  of  Lancaster  without  hope. 
When  Lewis  therefore  summoned  him  to  an  interview  on 
the  Somme,  Warwick,  though  unable  to  quit  England  in 
face  of  the  dangers  which  still  threatened  from  the  north, 
promised  to  send  his  brother  the  Chancellor  to  conduct  a 
negotiation.  Whether  the  mission  took  place  or  no,  the 
questions  not  only  of  peace  with  France  but  of  a  marriage 
between  Edward  and  one  of  the  French  King's  kinswomen 
were  discussed  in  the  English  Council  as  early  as  th« 
spring  of  1464,  for  in  the  May  of  that  year,  at  a  moment 
when  Warwick  was  hurrying  to  the  north  to  crush  Mar- 
garet's last  effort  in  the  battle  of  Hexham,  a  Burgundian 
agent  announced  to  the  Croys  that  an  English  embassy 
would  be  despatched  to  St.  Omer  on  the  coming  St.  John's 
day  to  confer  with  Lewis  and  Duke  Philip  on  the  peace 
and  the  marriage-treaty.  The  victory  of  Hexham  and  the 
capture  of  Henry,  successes  which  were  accepted  by  for- 


38  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

eign  powers  as  a  final  settlement  of  the  civil  strife,  and 
which  left  Edward's  hands  free  as  they  had  never  been 
free  before,  quickened  the  anxiety  of  Lewis,  who  felt  every 
day  the  toils  of  the  great  confederacy  of  the  French  princes 
closing  more  tightly  round  him.  But  Margaret  was  still 
in  his  hands,  and  Warwick  remained  firm  in  his  policy  of 
alliance.  At  Michaelmas  the  Earl  prepared  to  cross  the 
sea  for  the  meeting  at  St.  Omer. 

It  was  this  moment  that  Edward  chose  for  a  sudden  and 
decisive  blow.  Only  six  days  before  the  departure  of  the 
embassy  the  young  King  informed  his  Council  that  he  was 
already  wedded.  By  a  second  match  with  a  Kentish 
knight,  Sir  Richard  Woodville,  Jacquetta  of  Luxemburg, 
the  widow  of  the  Regent  Duke  of  Bedford,  had  become 
the  mother  of  a  daughter  Elizabeth.  Elizabeth  married 
Sir  John  Grey,  a  Lancastrian  partisan,  but  his  fall  some 
few  years  back  in  the  second  battle  of  St.  Albans  left  her 
a  widow,  and  she  caught  the  young  King's  fancy.  At 
the  opening  of  May,  at  the  moment  when  Warwick's  pur- 
pose to  conclude  the  marriage-treaty  was  announced  to  the 
court  of  Burgundy,  Edward  had  secretly  made  her  his 
wife.  He  had  reserved,  however,  the  announcement  of 
his  marriage  till  the  very  eve  of  the  negotiations,  when  its 
disclosure  served  not  only  to  shatter  Warwick's  plans  but 
to  strike  a  sudden  and  decisive  blow  at  the  sway  he  had 
wielded  till  now  in  the  royal  Council.  The  blow  in  fact 
was  so  sudden  and  unexpected  that  Warwick  could  only 
take  refuge  in  a  feigned  submission.  "  The  King, "  wrote 
one  of  his  partisans,  Lord  Wenlock,  to  the  Court  of  Bur- 
gundy, "  has  taken  a  wife  at  his  pleasure,  without  knowl- 
edge of  them  whom  he  ought  to  have  called  to  counsel  him ; 
by  reason  of  which  it  is  highly  displeasing  to  many  great 
lords  and  to  the  bulk  of  his  Council.  But  since  the  mar- 
riage has  gone  so  far  that  it  cannot  be  helped,  we  must 
take  patience  in  spite  of  ourselves."  Not  only  did  the  ne- 
gotiations with  France  come  to  an  end,  but  the  Earl  found 
himself  cut  off  from  the  King's  counsels.  "  As  one  knows 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  39 

not,"  wrote  his  adherent,  "seeing  the  marriage  is  made 
in  this  way,  what  purpose  the  King  may  have  to  go  on 
with  the  other  two  points,  truce  or  peace,  the  opinion  of 
the  Council  is  that  my  Lord  of  Warwick  will  not  pass  the 
sea  till  one  learns  the  King's  will  and  pleasure  on  that 
point."  Even  Warwick  indeed  might  have  paused  before 
the  new  aspect  of  affairs  across  the  Channel.  For  at  this 
moment  the  growing  weakness  of  Duke  Philip  enabled 
Charles  of  Charolais  to  overthrow  the  Croys,  and  to  be- 
come the  virtual  ruler  of  the  Burgundian  states.  At  the 
close  of  1464  the  League  of  the  Public  Weal  drew  fast  to 
a  head,  and  Charles  dispatched  the  Chancellor  of  Bur- 
gundy to  secure  the  aid  of  England.  But  the  English 
Council  met  the  advances  of  the  League  with  coldness. 
Edward  himself  could  have  seen  little  save  danger  to  his 
throne  from  its  triumph.  Count  Charles,  proud  of  his  con- 
nection with  the  House  of  Lancaster  through  his  Portu- 
guese mother,  a  descendant  of  John  of  Gaunt,  was  known 
to  be  hostile  to  the  Yorkist  throne.  The  foremost  of  his  col- 
leagues, John  of  Calabria,  was  a  son  of  Rene  of  Anjou  and 
a  brother  of  Margaret.  Another  of  the  conspirators,  the 
Count  of  Maine,  was  Margaret's  uncle.  It  was  significant 
that  the  Duke  of  Somerset  had  found  a  place  in  the  train 
of  Charles  the  Bold.  On,  the  other  hand  the  warmest  ad- 
vocates of  the  French  alliance  could  hardly  press  for  closer 
relations  with  a  King  whose  ruin  seemed  certain,  and  even 
Warwick  must  have  been  held  back  by  the  utter  collapse 
of  the  royal  power  when  the  League  attacked  Lewis  in 
1465.  Deserted  by  every  great  noble,  and  cooped  up  within 
the  walls  of  Paris,  the  French  King  could  only  save  him- 
self by  a  humiliating  submission  to  the  demands  of  the 
Leaguers. 

The  close  of  the  struggle  justified  Edward's  policy  of 
inaction,  for  the  terms  of  the  peace  told  strongly  for  Eng- 
lish interests.  The  restoration  of  the  towns  on  the  Somme 
to  Burgundy,  the  cession  of  Normandy  to  the  King's 
brother,  Francis,  the  hostility  of  Brittany,  not  only  de- 


40  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BoOK  V. 

tached  the  whole  western  coast  from  the  hold  of  Lewis, 
but  forced  its  possessors  to  look  for  aid  to  the  English 
King  who  lay  in  their  rear.  But  Edward  had  little  time 
to  enjoy  this  piece  of  good  luck.  No  sooner  had  the  army 
of  the  League  broken  up  than  its  work  was  undone.  The 
restless  genius  of  Lewis  detached  prince  from  prince,  won 
over  the  houses  of  Brittany  and  Anjou  to  friendship, 
snatched  back  Normandy  in  January,  1466,  and  gathered 
an  army  in  Picardy  to  meet  attack  either  from  England  or 
Count  Charles.  From  neither,  however,  was  any  serious 
danger  to  be  feared.  Charles  was  held  at  home  till  the 
close  of  the  year  by  revolts  at  Liege  and  Dinant,  while  a 
war  of  factions  within  Edward's  court  distracted  the  en- 
ergies of  England.  The  young  King  had  rapidly  followed 
up  the  blow  of  his  marriage  by  raising  his  wife's  family 
to  a  greatness  which  was  meant  to  balance  that  of  the 
Nevilles.  The  Queen's  father,  Lord  Rivers,  was  made 
treasurer  and  constable;  her  brothers  and  sisters  were 
matched  with  great  nobles  and  heiresses ;  the  heiress  of  the 
Duke  of  Exeter,  Edward's  niece,  whose  hand  Warwick 
sought  for  his  brother's  son,  was  betrothed  to  Elizabeth's 
son  by  her  former  marriage.  The  King's  confidence  was 
given  to  his  new  kinsmen,  and  Warwick  saw  himself 
checked  even  at  the  council-board  by  the  influence  of  the 
Woodvilles.  Still  true  to  an  alliance  with  France,  he  was 
met  by  their  advocacy  of  an  alliance  with  Burgundy  where 
Charles  of  Charolais  through  his  father's  sickness  and 
age  was  now  supreme.  Both  powers  were  equally  eager 
for  English  aid.  Lewis  despatched  an  envoy  to  prolong 
the  truce  from  his  camp  on  the  Somme,  and  proposed  to 
renew  negotiations  for  a  marriage  treaty  by  seeking  the 
hand  of  Edward's  sister,  Margaret,  for  a  French  prince. 
Though  "  the  thing  which  Charles  hated  most, "  as  Corn- 
mines  tells  us,  "was  the  house  of  York,"  the  stress  of 
politics  drew  him  as  irresistibly  to  Edward.  His  wife, 
Isabella  of  Bourbon,  had  died  during  the  war  of  the 
League,  and  much  as  such  a  union  was  "against  his 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461—1540.  41 

heart,"  the  activity  of  Lewis  forced  him  at  the  close  of 
1466  to  seek  to  buy  English  aid  by  demanding  Margaret's 
hand  in  marriage. 

It  is  from  this  moment  that  the  two  great  lines  of  our 
foreign  policy  become  settled  and  defined.  In  drawing 
together  the  states  of  the  Low  Countries  into  a  single  po- 
litical body,  the  Burgundian  Dukes  had  built  up  a  power 
which  has  ever  since  served  as  a  barrier  against  the  ad- 
vance of  France  to  the  north  or  its  mastery  of  the  Rhine. 
To  maintain  this  power,  whether  in  the  hands  of  the 
Dukes  or  their  successors,  the  Spaniard  or  the  Emperor, 
has  always  been  a  foremost  object  of  English  statesman- 
ship ;  and  the  Burgundian  alliance  in  its  earlier  or  later 
shapes  has  been  the  constant  rival  of  the  alliance  with 
France.  At  this  moment  indeed  the  attitude  of  Burgundy 
was  one  rather  of  attack  than  of  defence.  If  Charles  did 
not  aim  at  the  direct  conquest  of  France,  he  looked  to 
such  a  weakening  of  it  as  would  prevent  Lewis  from  hin- 
dering the  great  plan  on  which  he  had  set  his  heart,  the 
plan  of  uniting  his  scattered  dominions  on  the  northern 
and  eastern  frontier  of  his  rival  by  the  annexation  of  Lor- 
raine, and  of  raising  them  into  a  great  European  power  by 
extending  his  dominion  along  the  whole  course  of  the 
Rhine.  His  policy  was  still  to  strengthen  the  great  feuda- 
tories against  the  Crown.  "I  love  France  so  much,"  he 
laughed,  "  that  I  had  rather  it  had  six  kings  than  one ;" 
and  weak  as  the  League  of  the  Public  Weal  had  proved  he 
was  already  trying  to  build  up  a  new  confederacy  against 
Lewis.  In  this  confederacy  he  strove  that  England  should 
take  part.  Throughout  1466  the  English  court  was  the 
field  for  a  diplomatic  struggle  between  Charles  and  Lewis. 
Warwick  pressed  Margaret's  marriage  with  one  of  the 
French  princes.  The  marriage  with  Charles  was  backed 
by  the  Wcodvilles.  Edward  bore  himself  between  the 
two  parties  with  matchless  perfidy.  Apparently  yielding 
to  the  counsels  of  the  Earl,  he  despatched  him  in  1467  to 
treat  for  peace  with  Lewis  at  Rouen.  Warwick  was  re- 


43  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      IBoOK  V. 

ceived  with  honors  which  marked  the  importance  of  his 
mission  in  the  French  King's  eyes.  Bishops  and  clergy 
went  out  to  meet  him,  his  attendants  received  gifts  of 
velvet  robes  and  the  rich  stuffs  of  Rouen,  and  for  twelve 
days  the  Earl  and  Lewis  were  seen  busy  in  secret  confer- 
ence. But  while  the  Earl  was  busy  with  the  French  King 
the  Great  Bastard  of  Burgundy  crossed  to  England,  and 
a  sumptuous  tourney,  in  which  he  figured  with  one  of  the 
Woodvilles,  hardly  veiled  the  progress  of  counter-negotia- 
tions between  Charles  and  Edward  himself.  The  young 
King  seized  on  the  honors  paid  to  Warwick  as  the  pretext 
for  an  outburst  of  jealousy.  The  seals  were  suddenly  taken 
from  his  brother,  the  Archbishop  of  York,  and  when  the 
Earl  himself  returned  with  a  draft-treaty  stipulating  a 
pension  from  France  and  a  reference  of  the  English  claims 
on  Normandy  and  Guienne  to  the  Pope's  decision  Edward 
listened  coldly  and  disavowed  his  envoy. 

Bitter  reproaches  on  his  intrigues  with  the  French  King 
marked  even  more  vividly  the  close  of  Warwick's  power. 
He  withdrew  from  court  to  his  castle  of  Middleham,  while 
the  conclusion  of  a  marriage-treaty  between  Charles  and 
Margaret  proved  the  triumph  of  his  rivals.  The  death  of 
his  father  in  the  summer  of  1467  raised  Charles  to  the 
Dukedom  of  Burgundy,  and  his  diplomatic  success  in  Eng- 
land was  followed  by  preparations  for  a  new  struggle  with 
the  French  King.  In  1468  a  formal  league  bound  Eng- 
land, Burgundy,  and  Brittany  together  against  Lewis. 
While  Charles  gathered  an  army  in  Picardy  Edward 
bound  himself  to  throw  a  body  of  troops  into  the  strong 
places  of  Normandy  which  were  held  by  the  Breton  Duke ; 
and  six  thousand  mounted  archers  under  the  Queen's 
brother,  Anthony,  Lord  Scales,  were  held  ready  to  cross 
the  Channel.  Parliament  was  called  together  in  May, 
and  the  announcement  of  the  Burgundian  alliance  and  of 
the  King's  purpose  to  recover  his  heritage  over  sea  was 
met  by  a  large  grant  of  supplies  from  the  Commons.  In 
June  the  pompous  marriage  of  Margaret  with  the  Bur- 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  43 

gundian  Duke  set  its  seal  on  Edward's  policy.  How 
strongly  the  current  of  national  feeling  ran  in  its  favor 
was  seen  in  Warwick's  humiliation.  The  Earl  was  help- 
less. The  King's  dextrous  use  of  his  conference  with 
Lewis  and  of  the  honors  he  had  received  from  him  gave 
him  the  color  of  a  false  Englishman  and  of  a  friend  to 
France.  The  Earl  lost  power  over  the  Yorkists.  The 
war  party,  who  formed  the  bulk  of  it,  went  hotly  with  thei 
King;  the  merchants,  who  were  its  most  powerful  sup- 
port, leaned  to  a  close  connection  with  the  master  of 
Flanders  and  the  Lower  Rhine.  The  danger  of  his  posi- 
tion drove  Warwick  further  and  further  from  his  old 
standing  ground ;  he  clung  for  aid  to  Lewis ;  he  became 
the  French  king's  pensioner  and  dependant.  At  the 
French  court  he  was  looked  upon  already  as  a  partisan  of 
the  House  of  Lancaster.  Edward  dextrously  seized  on 
the  rumor  to  cut  him  off  more  completely  from  his  old 
party.  He  called  on  him  to  confront  his  accusers;  and 
though  Warwick  purged  himself  of  the  charge,  the  stigma 
remained.  The  victor  of  Towton  was  no  longer  counted 
as  a  good  Yorkist.  But  triumphant  as  he  was,  Edward 
had  no  mind  to  drive  the  Earl  into  revolt,  nor  was  War- 
wick ready  for  revenge.  The  two  subtle  enemies  drew 
together  again.  The  Earl  appeared  at  court;  he  was-for- 
mally  reconciled  both  to  the  King  and  to  the  Woodvilles; 
as  though  to  announce  his  conversion  to  the  Burgundian 
alliance  he  rode  before  the  new  Duchess  Margaret  on  her 
way  to  the  sea.  His  submission  removed  the  last  obstacle 
to  the  King's  action,  and  Edward  declared  his  purpose  to 
take  the  field  in  person  against  the  King  of  France. 

But  at  the  moment  when  the  danger  seemed  greatest  the 
quick,  hard  blows  of  Lewis  paralyzed  the  League.  He 
called  Margaret  from  Bar  to  Harfleur,  where  Jasper  Tudor, 
the  Earl  of  Pembroke,  prepared  to  cross  with  a  small  force 
of  French  soldiers  into  Wales.  The  dread  of  a  Lancastrian 
rising  should  Margaret  land  in  England  hindered  Lord 
Scales  from  crossing  the  sea ;  and  marking  the  slowness 


44  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       (BooK  v. 

with  which  the  Burgundian  troops  gathered  in  Picardy 
Lewis  flung  himself  in  September  on  the  Breton  Duke,  re- 
duced him  to  submission,  and  exacted  the  surrender  of  the 
Norman  towns  which  offered  an  entry  for  the  English 
troops.  His  eagerness  to  complete  his  work  by  persuading 
Charles  to  recognize  his  failure  in  a  personal  interview 
threw  him  into  the  Duke's  hands ;  and  though  he  was  re- 
leased at  the  end  of  the  year  it  was  only  on  humiliating 
terms.  But  the  danger  from  the  triple  alliance  was  over; 
he  had  bought  a  fresh  peace  with  Burgundy,  and  Ed- 
ward's hopes  of  French  conquest  were  utterly  foiled.  We 
can  hardly  doubt  that  this  failure  told  on  the  startling 
revolution  which  marked  the  following  year.  Master  of 
Calais,  wealthy,  powerful  as  he  was,  Warwick  had  shown 
by  his  feigned  submission  his  sense  that  single-handed  he 
was  no  match  for  the  King.  In  detaching  from  him  the 
confidence  of  the  Yorkist  party  which  had  regarded  him 
as  its  head,  Edward  had  robbed  him  of  his  strength.  But 
the  King  was  far  from  having  won  the  Yorkist  party  to 
himself.  His  marriage  with  the  widow  of  a  slain  Lan- 
castrian, his  promotion  of  a  Lancastrian  family  to  the 
highest  honors,  estranged  him  from  the  men  who  had 
fought  his  way  to  the  Crown.  Warwick  saw  that  the 
Yorkists  could  still  be  rallied  round  the  elder  of  Edward's 
brothers,  the  Duke  of  Clarence;  and  the  temper  of  Clar- 
ence, weak  and  greedy  of  power,  hating  the  Woodvilles, 
looking  on  himself  as  heir  to  the  crown  yet  dreading  the 
claims  of  Edward's  daughter  Elizabeth,  lent  itself  to  his 
arts.  The  spring  of  1469  was  spent  in  intrigues  to  win 
over  Clarence  by  offering  him  the  hand  of  Warwick's  elder 
daughter  and  co-heiress,  and  in  preparations  for  a  rising 
in  Lancashire.  So  secretly  were  these  conducted  that 
Edward  was  utterly  taken  by  surprise  when  Clarence  aiid 
the  Earl  met  in  July  at  Calais  and  the  marriage  of  the 
Duke  proved  the  signal  for  a  rising  at  home. 

The  revolt  turned  out  a  formidable  one.     The  first  force 
»ent  against  it  was  cut  to  pieces  at  Edgecote  near  Banbury, 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  45 

and  its  leaders,  Earl  Rivers  and  one  of  the  queen's  brothers, 
taken  and  beheaded.  Edward  was  hurrying  to  the  sup- 
port of  this  advanced  body  when  it  was  defeated;  but  on 
the  news  his  force  melted  away  and  he  was  driven  to  fall 
back  upon  London.  Galled  as  he  had  been  by  his  brother's 
marriage,  he  saw  nothing  in  it  save  the  greed  of  Clarence 
for  the  Earl's  heritage,  and  it  was  with  little  distrust  that 
he  summoned  Warwick  with  the  trained  troops  who 
formed  the  garrison  of  Calais  to  his  aid.  The  Duke  and 
Earl  at  once  crossed  the  Channel.  Gathering  troops  as 
they  moved,  they  joined  Edward  near  Oxford,  and  the 
end  of  their  plot  was  at  last  revealed.  No  sooner  had  the 
armies  united  than  Edward  found  himself  virtually  a  pris- 
oner in  Warwick's  hands.  But  'the  bold  scheme  broke 
down.  The  Yorkist  nobles  demanded  the  King's  libera- 
tion. London  called  for  it.  The  Duke  of  Burgundy 
"practised  secretly,"  says  Commines,  "that  Bang  Edward 
might  escape,"  and  threatened  to  break  off  all  trade  with 
Flanders  if  he  were  not  freed.  Warwick  could  look  for 
support  only  to  the  Lancastrians,  but  the  Lancastrians 
demanded  Henry's  restoration  as  the  price  of  their  aid. 
Such  a  demand  was  fatal  to  the  plan  for  placing  Clarence 
on  the  throne,  and  Warwick  was  thrown  back  on  a. formal 
reconciliation  with  the  King.  Edward  was  freed,  and 
Duke  and  Earl  withdrew  to  their  estates  for  the  winter. 
But  the  impulse  which  Warwick  had  given  to  his  adherents 
brought  about  a  new  rising  in  the  spring  of  1470.  A  force 
gathered  in  Lincolnshire  under  Sir  Robert  Welles  with 
the  avowed  purpose  of  setting  Clarence  on  the  throne,  and 
Warwick  and  the  Duke  though  summoned  to  Edward's 
camp  on  pain  of  being  held  for  traitors  remained  sullenly 
aloof.  The  King,  however,  was  now  ready  for  the  strife. 
A  rapid  march  to  the  north  ended  in  the  rout  of  the  in- 
surgents, and  Edward  turned  on  the  instigators  of  the 
rising.  But  Clarence  and  the  Earl  could  gather  no  force 
to  meet  him.  Yorkist  and  Lancastrian  alike  held  aloof, 
and  they  were  driven  to  flight.  Calais,  though  held  by 


46  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

Warwick's  deputy,  repulsed  them  from  its  walls,  and  the 
Earl's  fleet  was  forced  to  take  refuge  in  the  harbors  of 
France. 

The  long  struggle  seemed  at  last  over.  In  subtlety,  as 
in  warlike  daring,  the  young  King  had  proved  himself 
more  than  a  match  for  the  "  subtlest  man  of  men  now  liv- 
ing." He  had  driven  him  to  throw  himself  on  "  our  ad- 
versary of  France."  Warwick's  hold  over  the  Yorkists 
was  all  but  gone.  His  own  brothers,  the  Earl  of  North- 
umberland and  the  Archbishop  of  York,  were  with  the 
King,  and  Edward  counted  on  the  first  as  a  firm  friend. 
Warwick  had  lost  Calais.  Though  he  still  retained  his 
fleet  he  was  forced  to  support  it  by  making  prizes  of  Flem- 
ish ships,  and  this  involved  him  in  fresh  difficulties.  The 
Duke  of  Burgundy  made  the  reception  of  these  ships  in 
French  harbors  the  pretext  for  a  new  strife  with  Lewis; 
he  seized  the  goods  of  French  merchants  at  Bruges  and 
demanded  redress.  Lewis  was  in  no  humor  for  risking 
for  so  small  a  matter  the  peace  he  had  won,  and  refused 
to  see  or  speak  with  Warwick  till  the  prizes  were  restored. 
But  he  was  soon  driven  from  this  neutral  position.  The 
violent  language  of  Duke  Charles  showed  his  desire  to 
renew  the  war  with  France  in  the  faith  that  Warwick's 
presence  at  the  French  court  would  insure  Edward's  sup- 
port ;  and  Lewis  resolved  to  prevent  such  a  war  by  giving 
Edward  work  to  do  at  home.  He  supplied  Warwick  with 
money  and  men,  and  pressed  him  to  hasten  his  departure 
for  England.  "You  know,"  he  wrote  to  an  agent,  "the 
desire  I  have  for  Warwick's  return  to  England,  as  well 
because  I  wish  to  see  him  get  the  better  of  his  enemies  as 
that  at  least  through  him  the  realm  of  England  may  be 
again  thrown  into  confusion,  so  as  to  avoid  the  questions 
which  have  arisen  out  of  his  residence  here."  But  War- 
wick was  too  cautious  a  statesman  to  hope  to  win  England 
with  French  troops  only.  His  hopes  of  Yorkist  aid  were 
over  with  the  failure  of  Clarence;  and,  covered  as  he  was 
with  Lancastrian  blood,  he  turned  to  the  House  of  Lancas- 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1540.  47 

ter.  Margaret  was  summoned  to  the  French  court;  the  me- 
diation of  Lewis  bent  her  proud  spirit  to  a  reconciliation  on 
Warwick's  promise  to  restore  her  husband  to  the  throne, 
and  after  a  fortnight's  struggle  she  consented  at  the  close 
of  July  to  betroth  her  son  to  the  earl's  second  daughter, 
Anne  Neville.  Such  an  alliance  shielded  Warwick,  as  he 
trusted,  from  Lancastrian  vengeance,  but  it  at  once 
detached  Clarence  from  his  cause.  Edward  had  already 
made  secret  overtures  to  his  brother,  and  though  Warwick 
strove  to  reconcile  the  Duke  to  his  new  policy  by  a  provi- 
sion that  in  default  of  heirs  to  the  son  of  Margaret  Clarence 
should  inherit  the  throne,  the  Duke's  resentment  drew  him 
back  to  his  brother's  side.  But  whether  by  Edward's  coun- 
sel or  no  his  resentment  was  concealed ;  Clarence  swore 
fealty  to  the  house  of  Lancaster,  and  joined  in  the  prepara- 
tions which  Warwick  was  making  for  a  landing  in  Eng- 
land. • 

What  the  Earl  really  counted  on  was  not  so  much 
Lancastrian  aid  as  Yorkist  treason.  Edward  reckoned  on 
the  loyalty  of  Warwick's  brothers,  the  Archbishop  of 
York  and  Lord  Montagu.  The  last  indeed  he  "loved,*' 
and  Montagu's  firm  allegiance  during  his  brother's  de 
fection  seemed  to  justify  his  confidence  in  him.  But  in 
his  desire  to  redress  some ,  of  the  wrongs  of  the  civil  war 
Edward  had  utterly  estranged  the  Nevilles.  In  1469  he 
released  Henry  Percy  from  the  Tower,  and  restored  to  him 
the  title  and  estates  of  his  father,  the  attainted  Earl  of 
Northumberland.  Montagu  had  possessed  both  as  his 
share  of  the  Yorkist  spoil,  and  though  Edward  made  him  a 
marquis  in  amends  he  had  ever  since  nursed  plans  of  re- 
venge. From  after-events  it  is  clear  that  he  had  already 
pledged  himself  to  betray  the  King.  But  his  treachery 
was  veiled  with  consummate  art,  and  in  spite  of  repeated 
warnings  from  Burgundy  Edward  remained  unconcerned 
at  the  threats  of  invasion.  Of  the  Yorkist  party  he  held 
himself  secure  since  Warwick's  desertion  of  their  cause; 
of  the  Lancastrian,  he  had  little  fear:  and  the  powerful 

3  YOL.  2 


48  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

fleet  of  Duke  Charles  prisoned  the  Earl's  ships  in  the 
Norman  harbors.  Fortune,  however,  was  with  his  foes. 
A  rising  called  Edward  to  the  north  in  September,  and 
while  he  was  engaged  in  its  suppression  a  storm  swept  the 
Burgundian  ships  from  the  Channel.  Warwick  seized 
the  opportunity  to  cross  the  sea.  On  the  thirteenth  of 
September  he  landed  with  Clarence  at  Dartmouth,  and 
with  an  army  which  grew  at  every  step  pushed  rapidly 
northward  to  meet  the  King.  Taken  as  he  was  by  sur- 
prise, Edward  felt  little  dread  of  the  conflict.  He  relied 
on  the  secret  promises  of  Clarence  and  on  the  repeated  oaths 
of  the  two  Nevilles,  and  called  on  Charles  of  Burgundy 
to  cut  off  Warwick's  retreat  by  sea  after  the  victory  on 
which  he  counted.  But  the  Earl's  army  no  sooner  drew 
near  than  cries  of  "  Long  live  King  Henry !"  from  Mon- 
tagu's camp  announced  his  treason.  Panic  spread  through 
the  royal  forces ;  and  in  the  rout  that  followed  Edward 
could  only  fly  to  the  shore,  and  embarking  some  eight  hun- 
dred men  who  still  clung  to  him  in  a  few  trading  vessels 
which  he  found  there  set  sail  for  the  coast  of  Holland. 

In  a  single  fortnight  Warwick  had  destroyed  a  throne. 
The  work  of  Towton  was  undone.  The  House  of  Lancas- 
ter was  restored.  Henry  the  Sixth  was  drawn  from  the 
Tower  to  play  again  the  part  of  King,  while  his  rival  could 
only  appeal  as  a  destitute  fugitive  to  the  friendship  of 
Charles  the  Bold.  But  Charles  had  small  friendship  to 
give.  His  disgust  at  the  sudden  overthrow  of  his  plans 
for  a  joint  attack  on  Lewis  was  quickened  by  a  sense  of 
danger.  England  was  now  at  the  French  King's  dis- 
posal, and  the  coalition  of  England  and  Burgundy  against 
France  which  he  had  planned  seemed  likely  to  become  a 
coalition  of  France  and  England  against  Burgundy. 
Lewis  indeed  was  quick  to  seize  on  the  new  turn  of  affairs. 
Thanksgivings  were  ordered  in  every  French  town.  Mar- 
garet and  her  son  were  feasted  royally  at  Paris.  An  em- 
bassy crossed  the  sea  to  conclude  a  treaty  of  alliance,  and 
Warwick  promised  that  an  immediate  force  of  four  thott 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  49 

sand  men  should  be  dispatched  to  Calais.  With  English 
aid  the  King  felt  he  could  become  assailant  in  his  turn ; 
he  declared  the  King  of  Burgundy  a  rebel,  and  pushed  his 
army  rapidly  to  the  Somme.  How  keenly  Charles  felt 
his  danger  was  seen  in  his  refusal  to  receive  Edward  at 
his  court,  and  in  his  desperate  attempts  to  conciliate  the 
new  English  government.  His  friendship,  he  said,  was 
not  for  this  or  that  English  King  but  for  England.  He 
Again  boasted  of  his  Lancastrian  blood.  He  despatched 
the  Lancastrian  Dukes  of  Somerset  and  Exeter,  who  had 
found  refuge  ever  since  Towton  at  his  court,  to  carry  fair 
words  to  Margaret.  The  Queen  and  her  son  were  still  at 
Paris,  detained  as  it  was  said  by  unfavorable  winds,  but 
really  by  the  wish  of  Lewis  to  hold  a  check  upon  Warwick 
and  by  their  own  distrust  of  him.  Triumphant  indeed  as 
he  seemed,  the  Earl  found  himself  alone  in  the  hour  of  his 
triumph.  The  marriage  of  Prince  Edward  with  Anne 
Neville,  which  had  been  promised  as  soon  as  Henry  was 
restored,  was  his  one  security  against  the  vengeance  of  the 
Lancastrians,  and  the  continued  delays  of  Margaret  showed 
little  eagerness  to  redeem  her  promise.  The  heads  of  the 
Lancastrian  party,  the  Dukes  of  Somerset  and  Exeter,  had 
pledged  themselves  to  Charles  the  Bold  at  their  departure 
from  his  court  to  bring  about  Warwick's  ruin.  From 
Lewis  he  could  look  for  no  further  help,  for  the  remon- 
strances of  the  English  merchants  compelled  him  in  spita 
of  the  treaty  he  had  concluded  to  keep  the  troops  he  had 
promised  against  Burgundy  at  home.  Of  his  own  main, 
supporters  Clarence  was  only  waiting  for  an  opportunity 
of  deserting  him.  Even  his  brother  Montagu  shrank  fron\ 
striking  fresh  blows  to  further  the  triumph  of  a  party  which 
aimed  at  the  ruin  of  the  Nevilles,  and  looked  forward  with 
dread  to  the  coming  of  the  Queen. 

The  preparations  for  her  departure  in  March  brought 
matters  to  a  head.  With  a  French  Queen  on  the  throne 
a  French  alliance  became  an  instant  danger  for  Burgundyc 
and  Charles  was  driven  to  lend  a  secret  ear  to  Edward's 


50  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

prayer  for  aid.  Money  and  ships  were  placed  at  his  ser- 
vice, and  on  the  fourteenth  of  March,  1471,  the  young 
King  landed  at  Ravenspur  on  the  estuary  of  the  Humber 
with  a  force  of  two  thousand  men.  In  the  north  all  re- 
mained quiet.  York  opened  its  gates  when  Edward  pro* 
fessed  to  be  seeking  not  the  crown  but  his  father's  dukedom. 
Montagu  lay  motionless  at  Pomfret  as  the  little  army 
marched  by  him  to  the  south.  Routing  at  Newark  a  force 
which  had  gathered  on  his  flank,  Edward  pushed  straight 
for  Warwick,  who  had  hurried  from  London  to  raise  an 
army  in  his  own  county.  His  forces  were  already  larger 
than  those  of  his  cousin,  but  the  Earl  cautiously  waited 
within  the  walls  of  Coventry  for  the  reinforcements  under 
Clarence  and  Montagu  which  he  believed  to  be  hastening 
to  his  aid.  The  arrival  of  Clarence,  however,  was  at  once 
followed  by  his  junction  with  Edward,  and  the  offer  of 
"  good  conditions"  shows  that  Warwick  himself  was  con- 
templating a  similar  treason  when  the  coming  of  two  Lan- 
castrian leaders,  the  Duke  of  Exeter  and  the  Earl  of  Ox- 
ford, put  an  end  to  the  negotiation.  The  union  of  Montagu 
with  his  brother  forced  Edward  to  decisive  action;  he 
marched  upon  London,  followed  closely  by  Warwick's 
army,  and  found  its  gates  opened  by  the  perfidy  of  Arch- 
bishop Neville.  Again  master  of  Henry  of  Lancaster, 
who  passed  anew  to  the  Tower,  Edward  sallied  afresh  from 
the  capital  two  days  after  his  arrival  with  an  army  strongly 
reinforced.  At  early  dawn  on  the  fourteenth  of  April  the 
two  hosts  fronted  one  another  at  Barnet.  A  thick  mist 
covered  the  field,  and  beneath  its  veil  Warwick's  men 
fought  fiercely  till  dread  of  mutual  betrayal  ended  the  strife. 
Montagu's  followers  attacked  the  Lancastrian  soldiers  of 
Lord  Oxford,  whether  as  some  said  through  an  error  which 
sprang  from  the  similarity  of  his  cognizance  to  that  of 
Edward's,  or  as  the  Lancastrians  alleged  while  themselves 
in  the  act  of  deserting  to  the  enemy.  Warwick  himself 
was  charged  with  cowardly  flight.  In  three  hours  the 
medley  of  carnage  and  treason  was  over.  Four  thousand 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  51 

men  lay  on  the  field ;  and  the  Earl  and  his  brother  were 
found  among  the  slain. 

But  the  fall  of  the  Nevilles  was  far  from  giving  rest  to 
Edward.  The  restoration  of  Henry,  the  return  of  their 
old  leaders,  had  revived  the  hopes  of  the  Lancastrian  party ; 
and  in  the  ruin  of  Warwick  they  saw  only  the  removal  of 
an  obstacle  to  their  cause.  The  great  Lancastrian  lords 
had  been  looking  forward  to  a  struggle  with  the  Earl  on 
Margaret's  arrival,  and  their  jealousy  of  him  was  seen  in 
the  choice  of  the  Queen's  landing-place.  Instead  of  join- 
ing her  husband  and  the  Nevilles  in  London  she  disem- 
barked from  the  French  fleet  at  Weymouth,  to  find  the  men 
of  the  western  counties  already  flocking  to  the  standards 
of  the  Duke  of  Somerset  and  of  the  Courtenays,  the  Welsh 
arming  at  the  call  of  Jasper  Tudor,  and  Cheshire  and  Lan- 
cashire only  waiting  for  her  presence  to  rise.  A  march 
upon  London  with  forces  such  as  these  would  have  left 
Warwick  at  her  mercy  and  freed  the  Lancastrian  throne 
from  the  supremacy  of  the  Nevilles.  The  news  of  Barnet 
which  followed  hard  on  the  Queen's  landing  scattered  these 
plans  to  the  winds;  but  the  means  which  had  been  de- 
signed to  overawe  Warwick  might  still  be  employed  against 
his  conqueror.  Moving  to  Exeter  to  gather  the  men  of 
Devonshire  and  Corn  wall,,  Margaret  turned  through  Taun- 
ton  on  Bath  to  hear  that  Edward  was  already  encamped 
in  her  front  at  Cirencester.  The  young  King's  action 
showed  his  genius  for  war.  Barnet  was  hardly  fought 
when  he  was  pushing  to  the  west.  After  a  halt  at  Abing- 
don  to  gain  news  of  Margaret's  movements  he  moved 
rapidly  by  Cirencester  and  Malmesbury  toward  the  Lan- 
castrians at  Bath.  But  Margaret  was  as  eager  to  avoid  a 
battle  before  her  Welsh  reinforcements  reached  her  as  Ed- 
ward was  to  force  one  on.  Slipping  aside  to  Bristol,  and 
detaching  a  small  body  of  troops  to  amuse  the  King  by  a 
feint  upon  Sodbury,  her  army  reached  Berkeley  by  a  night- 
march  and  hurried  forward  through  the  following  day  to 
Tewkesbury.  But  rapid  us  their  movements  had  been, 


52  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

they  had  failed  to  outstrip  Edward.  Marching  on  an  inner 
line  along  the  open  Cotswold  country  while  his  enemy  was 
struggling  through  the  deep  and  tangled  lanes  of  the  Sev- 
ern valley,  the  King  was  now  near  enough  to  bring  Mar- 
garet to  bay;  and  the  Lancastrian  leaders  were  forced  to 
take  their  stand  on  the  slopes  south  of  the  town,  in  a  posi- 
tion approachable  only  through  "foul  lanes  and  deep 
dykes."  Here  Edward  at  once  fell  on  them  at  daybreak 
of  the  fourth  of  May.  His  army,  if  smaller  in  numbers, 
was  superior  in  military  quality  to  the  motley  host  gath- 
ered round  the  Queen,  for  as  at  Barnet  he  had  with  him  a 
force  of  Germans  armed  with  hand-guns,  then  a  new 
weapon  in  war,  and  a  fine  train  of  artillery.  It  was  prob- 
ably the  fire  from  these  that  drew  Somerset  from  the  strong 
position  which  he  held,  but  his  repulse  and  the  rout  of  the 
force  he  led  was  followed  up  with  quick  decision.  A  gen- 
eral advance  broke  the  Lancastrian  lines,  and  all  was  over. 
Three  thousand  were  cut  down  on  the  field,  and  a  large 
number  of  fugitives  were  taken  in  the  town  and  abbey. 
To  the  leaders  short  shrift  was  given.  Edward  was  reso- 
lute to  make  an  end  of  his  foes.  The  fall  of  the  Duke  of 
Somerset  extinguished  the  male  branch  of  the  House  of 
Beaufort.  Margaret  was  a  prisoner;  and  with  the  mur- 
der of  her  son  after  his  surrender  on  the  field  and  the  mys- 
terious death  of  Henry  the  Sixth  in  the  Tower  which  fol- 
lowed the  King's  return  to  the  capital  the  direct  line  of 
Lancaster  passed  away. 

Edward  was  at  last  master  of  his  realm.  No  noble  was 
likely  to  measure  swords  with  the  conqueror  of  the  Ne- 
villes. The  one  rival  who  could  revive  the  Lancastrian 
claims,  the  last  heir  of  the  House  of  Beaufort,  Henry  Tu- 
dor, was  a  boy  and  an  exile.  The  King  was  free  to  display 
his  genius  for  war  on  nobler  fields  than  those  of  Barnet 
and  Tewkesbury,  and  for  a  while  his  temper  and  the  pas- 
sion of  his  people  alike  drove  him  to  the  strife  with  France. 
But  the  country  was  too  exhausted  to  meddle  in  the  attack 
on  Lewis  which  Charles,  assured  at  any  rate  against  Eng- 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  53 

lish  hostility,  renewed  in  1472  in  union  with  the  Dukes  of 
Guienne  and  Brittany,  and  which  was  foiled  as  of  old 
through  the  death  of  the  one  ally  and  the  desertion  of  the 
other.  The  failure  aided  in  giving  a  turn  to  his  policy, 
which  was  to  bring  about  immense  results  on  the  after 
history  of  Europe.  French  as  he  was  in  blood,  the  nature 
of  his  possessions  had  made  Charles  from  the  first  a  Ger- 
man prince  rather  than  a  French.  If  he  held  of  Lewis  his 
duchy  of  Burgundy,  his  domain  on  the  Somme,  and  Flan- 
ders west  of  the  Scheldt,  the  mass  of  his  dominions  was 
held  of  the  Empire.  While  he  failed  too  in  extending  his 
power  on  the  one  side  it  widened  rapidly  on  the  other.  In 
war  after  war  he  had  been  unable  to  gain  an  inch  of  French 
ground  beyond  the  towns  of  the  Somme.  But  year  after 
year  had  seen  new  gains  on  his  German  frontier.  Elsass 
and  the  Breisgau  passed  into  his  hands  as  security  for  a 
loan  to  the  Austrian  Duke  Sigismund;  in  1473  he  seized 
Lorraine  by  force  of  arms,  and  inherited  from  its  Duke 
Gelderland  and  the  county  of  Cleves.  Master  of  the  Upper 
Rhine  and  Lower  Rhine,  as  well  as  of  a  crowd  of  German 
princedoms,  Charles  was  now  the  mightiest  among  the 
princes  of  the  Empire,  and  in  actual  power  superior  to  the 
Emperor  himself.  The  house  of  Austria,  in  which  the  Im- 
perial crown  seemed  to  be  becoming  hereditary,  was  weak- 
ened by  attacks  from  without  as  by  divisions  within,  by 
the  loss  of  Bohemia  and  Hungary,  by  the  loss  of  its  hold 
over  German  Switzerland,  and  still  more  by  the  mean  and 
spiritless  temper  of  its  Imperial  head,  Frederick  the  Third. 
But  its  ambition  remained  boundless  as  ever ;  and  in  the 
Burgundian  dominion,  destined  now  to  be  the  heritage  of 
a  girl,  for  Mary  was  the  Duke's  only  child,  it  saw  the 
means  of  building  up  a  greatness  such  as  it  had  never 
known.  Its  overtures  at  once  turned  the  Duke's  ambition 
from  France  to  Germany.  He  was  ready  to  give  his 
daughter's  hand  to  Frederick's  son,  Maximilian ;  but  his 
price  was  that  of  succession  to  the  Imperial  crown,  and 
his  election  to  the  dignity  of  King  of  the  Romans.  In  such 


54  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

an  event  the  Empire  and  his  vast  dominions  would  pass 
together  at  his  death  to  Maximilian,  and  the  aim  of  the 
Austrian  House  would  be  realized.  It  was  to  negotiate 
this  marriage,  a  marriage  which  in  the  end  was  destined 
to  shape  the  political  map  of  modern  Europe,  that  Duke 
and  Emperor  met  in  1473  at  Trier. 

But  if  Frederick's  policy  was  to  strengthen  his  house 
the  policy  of  the  princes  of  the  Empire  lay  in  keeping  it 
weak ;  and  their  pressure  was  backed  by  suspicions  of  the 
Duke's  treachery  and  of  the  possibility  of  a  later  marriage 
whose  male  progeny  might  forever  exclude  the  house  of 
Austria  from  the  Imperial  throne.  Frederick's  sudden 
flight  broke  up  the  conference;  but  Charles  was  far  from 
relinquishing  his  plans.  To  win  the  mastery  of  the  whole 
Rhine  valley  was  the  first  step  in  their  realization,  and  at 
the  opening  of  1474  he  undertook  the  siege  of  Neuss,  whose 
reduction  meant  that  of  Koln  and  of  the  central  district 
which  broke  his  sway  along  it.  But  vast  as  were  the  new 
dreams  of  ambition  which  thus  opened  before  Charles,  he 
had  given  no  open  sign  of  his  change  of  purpose.  Lewis 
watched  his  progress  on  the  Rhine  almost  as  jealously  as 
his  attitude  on  the  Somme ;  and  the  friendship  of  England 
was  still  of  the  highest  value  as  a  check  on  any  attempt 
of  France  to  interrupt  his  plans.  With  this  view  the  Duke 
maintained  his  relations  with  England  and  fed  Edward's 
hopes  of  a  joint  invasion.  In  the  summer  of  1474,  on  the 
eve  of  his  march  upon  the  Rhine,  he  concluded  a  treaty  for 
an  attack  on  France  which  was  to  open  on  his  return  after 
the  capture  of  Neuss.  Edward  was  to  recover  Normandy 
and  Aquitaine  as  well  as  his  "  kingdom  of  France" ;  Cham- 
pagne and  Bar  were  to  be  the  prizes  of  Charles.  Through 
the  whole  of  1474  the  English  king  prepared  actively  for 
war.  A  treaty  was  concluded  with  Brittany.  The  na- 
tion was  wild  with  enthusiasm.  Large  supplies  were 
granted  by  Parliament :  and  a  large  army  gathered  for  the 
coming  campaign.  The  plan  of  attack  was  a  masterly  one. 
While  Edward  moved  from  Normandy  on  Paris,  the  f o*»se 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  55 

of  Burgundy  and  of  Brittany  on  his  right  hand  and  his 
left  were  to  converge  on  the  same  point.  But  the  aim  of 
Charles  in  these  negotiations  was  simply  to  hold  Lewis 
from  any  intervention  in  his  campaign  on  the  Rhine.  The 
siege  of  Neuss  was  not  opened  till  the  close  of  July,  and 
its  difficulties  soon  unfolded  themselves.  Once  master  of 
the  whole  Rhineland,  the  house  of  Austria  saw  that  Charles 
would  be  strong  enough  to  wrest  from  it  the  succession  to 
the  Empire ;  and  while  Sigismund  paid  back  his  loan  and 
roused  Elsass  to  revolt  the  Emperor  Frederick  brought  the 
whole  force  of  Germany  to  the  relief  of  the  town.  From 
that  moment  the  siege  was  a  hopeless  one,  but  Charles 
clung  to  it  with  stubborn  pride  through  autumn,  winter, 
and  spring,  and  it  was  only  at  the  close  of  June,  1475,  that 
the  menace  of  new  leagues  against  his  dominions  on  the 
upper  Rhineland  forced  him  to  withdraw.  So  broken  was 
his  army  that  he  could  not,  even  if  he  would,  have  aided 
in  carrying  out  the  schemes  of  the  preceding  year.  But 
an  English  invasion  would  secure  him  from  attack  by 
Lewis  till  his  forces  could  be  reorganized ;  and  with  the 
same  unscrupulous  selfishness  as  of  old  Charles  pledged 
himself  to  co-operate  and  called  on  Edward  to  cross  the 
Channel.  In  July  Edward  landed  with  an  army  of  twenty- 
four  thousand  men  at  Calais.  In  numbers  and  in  com- 
pleteness of  equipment  no  such  force  had  as  yet  left  English 
shores.  But  no  Burgundian  force  was  seen  on  the  Somme ; 
and  after  long  delays  Charles  proposed  that  Edward  should 
advance  alone  upon  Paris  on  his  assurance  that  the  for- 
tresses of  the  Somme  would  open  their  gates.  The  English 
army  crossed  the  Somme  and  approached  St.  Quentin,  but 
it  was  repulsed  from  the  walls  by  a  discharge  of  artillery. 
It  was  now  the  middle  of  August,  and  heavy  rains  pre- 
vented further  advance ;  while  only  excuses  for  delay  came 
from  Brittany  and  it  became  every  day  clearer  that  the 
Burgundian  Duke  had  no  real  purpose  to  aid.  Lewis 
seized  the  moment  of  despair  to  propose  peace  on  terms 
which  a  conqueror  might  have  accepted,  the  security  of 


56  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     .(BOOK  V. 

Brittany,  the  payment  of  what  the  English  deemed  a  trib- 
ute of  fifty  thousand  crowns  a  year,  and  the  betrothal  of 
Edward's  daughter  to  the  Dauphin.  A  separate  treaty 
provided  for  mutual  aid  in  case  of  revolt  among  the  sub- 
jects of  either  king,  and  for  mutual  shelter  should  either 
be  driven  from  his  realm.  In  spite  of  remonstrances  from 
the  Duke  of  Burgundy  this  truce  was  signed  at  the  close 
of  August  and  the  English  soldiers  recrossed  the  sea. 

The  desertion  of  Charles  threw  Edward  whether  he 
would  or  no  on  the  French  alliance;  and  the  ruin  of  the 
Duke  explains  the  tenacity  with  which  he  clung  to  it. 
Defeated  by  the  Swiss  at  Morat  in  the  following  year, 
Charles  fell  in  the  opening  of  1477  on  the  field  of  Nanci, 
and  his  vast  dominion  was  left  in  his  daughter's  charge. 
Lewis  seized  Picardy  and  Artois.  the  Burgundian  duchy 
and  Franche  Comte :  and  strove  to  gain  the  rest  by  forc- 
ing on  Mary  of  Burgundy  the  hand  of  the  Dauphin.  But 
the  Imperial  dreams  which  had  been  fatal  to  Charles  had 
to  be  carried  out  through  the  very  ruin  they  wrought. 
Pressed  by  revolt  in  Flanders  and  by  the  French  king's 
greed,  Mary  gave  her  hand  to  the  Emperor's  son,  Maxi- 
milian; 'and  her  heritage  passed  to  the  Austrian  house. 
Edward  took  no  part  in  the  war  between  Lewis  and  Maxi- 
milian which  followed  on  the  marriage.  The  contest  be- 
tween England  and  France  had  drifted  into  a  mightier 
European  struggle  between  France  and  the  House  of  Aus- 
tria ;  and  from  this  struggle  the  King  wisely  held  aloof. 
He  saw  what  Henry  the  Seventh  saw  after  him  and  what 
Henry  the  Eighth  learned  at  last  to  see,  that  England  could 
only  join  in  such  a  contest  as  the  tool  of  one  or  other  of  the 
combatants,  a  tool  to  be  used  while  the  struggle  lasted  and 
to  be  thrown  aside  as  soon  as  it  was  over.  With  the 
growth  of  Austrian  power  England  was  secure  from  French 
aggression;  and  rapidly  as  Lewis  was  adding  province 
after  province  to  his  dominions  his  loyalty  to  the  pledge 
he  had  given  of  leaving  Brittany  untouched  and  his  anx- 
iety to  conclude  a  closer  treaty  of  amity  in  1478  showed 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  57 

the  price  he  set  on  his  English  alliance.  Nor  was  Ed- 
ward's course  guided  solely  by  considerations  of  foreign 
policy.  A  French  alliance  meant  peace ;  and  peace  was 
needful  for  the  plans  which  Edward  proceeded  steadily  to 
carry  out.  With  the  closing  years  of  his  reign  the  Mon- 
archy took  a  new  color.  The  introduction  of  an  elaborate 
spy  system,  the  use  of  the  rack,  and  the  practice  of  inter- 
ference with  the  purity  of  justice  gave  the  first  signs  of 
an  arbitrary  rule  which  the  Tudors  were  to  develop.  It 
was  on  his  creation  of  a  new  financial  system  that  the 
King  laid  the  foundation  of  a  despotic  rule.  Rich,  and 
secure  at  home  as  abroad,  Edward  had  small  need  to  call 
the  Houses  together;  no  parliament  met  for  five  years, 
and  when  one  was  called  at  last  it  was  suffered  to  do  little 
but  raise  the  custom  duties,  which  were  now  granted  to 
the  King  for  life.  Sums  were  extorted  from  the  clergy ; 
monopolies  were  sold;  the  confiscations  of  the  civil  war 
filled  the  royal  exchequer ;  Edward  did  not  disdain  to  turn 
merchant  on  his  own  account.  The  promise  of  a  French 
war  had  not  only  drawn  heavy  subsidies  from  the  Com- 
mons, much  of  which  remained  in  the  royal  treasury 
through  the  abrupt  close  of  the  strife,  but  enabled  the  King 
to  deal  a  deadly  blow  at  the  liberty  which  the  Commons 
had  won.  Edward  set  aside  the  usage  of  contracting  loans 
by  authority  of  parliament ;  and  calling  before  him  the 
merchants  of  London,  begged  from  each  a  gift  or  "  benev- 
olence" in  proportion  to  the  royal  needs.  How  bitterly 
this  exaction  was  resented  even  by  the  classes  with  whom 
the  King  had  been  most  popular  was  seen  in  the  protest 
which  the  citizens  addressed  to  his  successor  against  these 
"  extortions  and  new  impositions  against  the  laws  of  Gcd 
and  man  and  the  liberty  and  laws  of  this  realm."  But  for 
the  moment  resistance  was  fruitless,  and  the  "  benevolence" 
of  Edward  was  suffered  to  furnish  a  precedent  for  the  f oread 
loans  of  Wolsey  and  of  Charles  the  First. 

In  the  history  of  intellectual  progress  his  reign  takes  a 
brighter  color.     The  founder  of  a  aew  despotism  presents 


J8  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.        [BOOK  V. 

a  claim  to  our  regard  as  the  patron  of  Caxton.  It  is  in  the 
life  of  the  first  English  printer  that  we  see  the  new  up- 
growth of  larger  and  more  national  energies  which  were  to 
compensate  for  the  decay  of  the  narrower  energies  of  the 
Middle  Age.  Beneath  the  mouldering  forms  of  the  old 
world  a  new  world  was  bursting  into  life ;  if  the  fifteenth 
century  was  an  age  of  death  it  was  an  age  of  birth  as  well, 
of  that  new  birth,  that  Renascence,  from  which  the  after 
life  of  Europe  was  to  flow.  The  force  which  till  now  con- 
centrated itself  in  privileged  classes  was  beginning  to  dif- 
fuse itself  through  nations.  The  tendency  of  the  time 
was  to  expansion,  to  diffusion.  The  smaller  gentry  and 
the  merchant  class  rose  in  importance  as  the  nobles  fell. 
Religion  and  morality  passed  out  of  the  hands  of  the  priest- 
hood into  those  of  the  laity.  Knowledge  became  vulgar- 
ized, it  stooped  to  lower  and  meaner  forms  that  it  might 
educate  the  whole  people.  England  was  slow  to  catch  the 
intellectual  fire  which  was  already  burning  brightly  across 
the  Alps,  but  even  amid  the  turmoil  of  its  wars  and  revo- 
lutions intelligence  was  being  more  widely  spread.  While 
the  older  literary  class  was  dying  out,  a  glance  beneath 
the  surface  shows  us  the  stir  of  a  new  interest  in  knowl- 
edge among  the  masses  of  the  people  itself.  The  very 
character  of  the  authorship  of  the  time,  its  love  of  com- 
pendiums  and  abridgments  of  such  scientific  and  histori- 
cal knowledge  as  the  world  believed  it  possessed,  its  dra- 
matic performances  or  mysteries,  the  commonplace 
morality  of  its  poets,  the  popularity  of  its  rhymed  chronicles, 
are  proof  that  literature  was  ceasing  to  be  the  possession 
of  a  purely  intellectual  class  and  was  beginning  to  appeal 
to  the  nation  at  large.  The  correspondence  of  the  Paston 
family  not  only  displays  a  fluency  and  grammatical  cor- 
rectness which  would  have  been  impossible  a  few  years 
before,  but  shows  country  squires  discussing  about  books 
and  gathering  libraries.  The  increased  use  of  linen  paper 
in  place  of  the  costlier  parchment  helped  in  the  populari- 
zation of  letters.  In  no  former  age  had  finer  copies  of 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1540.  59 

books  been  produced ;  in  none  had  so  many  been  transcribed. 
This  increased  demand  for  their  production  caused  the  pro- 
cesses of  copying  and  illuminating  manuscripts  to  be  trans- 
ferred from  the  scriptoria  of  the  religious  houses  into  the 
hands  of  trade  guilds  like  the  Guild  of  St.  John  at  Bruges 
or  the  Brothers  of  the  Pen  at  Brussels.  It  was  in  fact  this 
increase  of  demand  for  books,  pamphlets,  or  fly-sheets,  es- 
pecially of  a  grammatical  or  religious  character,  in  the 
middle  of  the  fifteenth  century  that  brought  about  the  in- 
troduction of  printing.  We  meet  with  the  first  records  of 
the  printer's  art  in  rude  sheets  struck  off  from  wooden 
blocks,  "  block-books"  as  they  are  now  called.  Later  on 
came  the  vast  advance  of  printing  from  separate  and  mov- 
able types.  Originating  at  Maintz  with  the  three  famous 
printers,  Gutenberg,  Fust,  and  Schoeffer,  this  new  process 
travelled  southward  to  Strassburg,  crossed  the  Alps  to 
Venice,  where  it  lent  itself  through  the  Aldi  to  the  spread 
of  Greek  literature  in  Europe,  and  then  floated  down  the 
Rhine  to  the  towns  of  Flanders. 

It  was  probably  at  the  press  of  Colard  Mansion,  in  a  lit- 
tle room  over  the  porch  of  St.  Donat's  at  Bruges,  that  Wil- 
liam Caxton  learned  the  art  which  he  was  the  first  to  in- 
troduce into  England.  A  Kentish  boy  by  birth,  but 
apprenticed  to  a  London  mercer,  Caxton  had  already  spent 
thirty  years  of  his  manhood  in  Flanders  as  Governor  of 
the  English  guild  of  Merchant  Adventurers  there  when  we 
find  him  engaged  as  copyist  in  the  service  of  Edward's 
sister,  Duchess  Margaret  of  Burgundy.  But  the  tedious 
process  of  copying  was  soon  thrown  aside  for  the  new  art 
which  Colard  Mansion  had  introduced  into  Bruges.  "  For 
as  much  as  in  the  writing  of  the  same,"  Caxton  tells  us  in 
the  preface  to  his  first  printed  work,  the  Tales  of  Troy, 
"  my  pen  is  worn,  my  hand  weary  and  not  steadfast,  mine 
eyes  dimmed  with  over  much  looking  on  the  white  paper, 
and  my  courage  not  so  prone  and  ready  to  labor  as  it  hath 
been,  and  that  age  creepeth  on  me  daily  and  feebleth  all 
the  body,  and  also  because  I  have  promised  to  divers  gen- 


60  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

tlemen  and  to  my  friends  to  address  to  them  as  hastily  as 
I  might  the  said  book,  therefore  I  have  practised  and  learned 
at  my  great  charge  and  dispense  to  ordain  this  said  book 
in  print  after  the  manner  and  form  as  ye  may  see,  and  is 
not  written  with  pen  and  ink  as  other  books  be,  to  the  end 
that  every  man  may  have  them  at  once,  for  all  the  books 
of  this  story  here  emprynted  as  ye  see  were  begun  in  one 
day  and  also  finished  in  one  day."  The  printing-press 
was  the  precious  freight  he  brought  back  to  England  in 
1476  after  an  absence  of  five-and- thirty  years.  Through 
the  next  fifteen,  at  an  age  when  other  men  look  for  ease 
and  retirement,  we  see  him  plunging  with  characteristic 
energy  into  his  new  occupation.  His  "  red  pale"  or  her- 
aldic shield  marked  with  a  red  bar  down  the  middle  in- 
vited buyers  to  the  press  he  established  in  the  Almonry  at 
Westminster,  a  little  enclosure  containing  a  chapel  and 
almshouses  near  the  west  front  of  the  church,  where  the 
alms  of  the  abbey  were  distributed  to  the  poor.  "  If  it 
please  any  man,  spiritual  or  temporal,"  runs  his  advertise- 
ment, "  to  buy  any  pyes  of  two  or  three  commemorations  of 
Salisbury  all  emprynted  after  the  form  of  the  present  let- 
ter, which  be  well  and  truly  correct,  let  him  come  to  West- 
minster into  the  Almonry  at  the  red  pale,  and  he  shall  have 
them  good  chepe."  Caxton  was  a  practical  man  of  busi- 
ness, as  this  advertisement  shows,  no  rival  of  the  Venetian 
Aldi  or  of  the  classical  printers  of  Rome,  but  resolved  to 
get  a  living  from  his  trade,  supplying  priests  with  service 
books  and  preachers  with  sermons,  furnishing  the  clerk 
with  his  "Golden  Legend"  and  knight  and  baron  with 
"joyous  and  pleasant  histories  of  chivalry."  But  while 
careful  to  win  his  daily  bread,  he  found  time  to  do  much 
for  what  of  higher  literature  lay  fairly  to  hand.  He  printed 
all  the  English  poetry  of  any  moment  which  was  then  in 
existence.  His  reverence  for  that "  worshipful  man,  Geof- 
frey Chaucer,"  who  "ought  to  be  eternally  remembered," 
is  shown  not  merely  by  his  edition  of  the  "  Canterbury 
Tales,"  but  by  his  reprint  of  them  when  a  purer  text  of  the 


CHAP.  l.J  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  61 

poem  offered  itself.  The  poems  of  Lydgate  and  Gower 
were  added  to  those  of  Chaucer.  The  Chronicle  of  Brut 
and  Higden's  "  Polychronicon"  were  the  only  available 
works  of  an  historical  character  then  existing  in  the  Eng- 
lish tongue,  and  Caxton  not  only  printed  them  but  himself 
continued  the  latter  up  to  his  own  time.  A  translation  of 
Boethius,  a  version  of  the  Eneid  from  the  French,  and  a 
tract  or  two  of  Cicero,  were  the  stray  first-fruits  of  the 
classical  press  in  England. 

Busy  as  was  Caxton 's  printing-press,  he  was  even  busier 
as  a  translator  than  as  a  printer.  More  than  four  thousand 
of  his  printed  pages  are  from  works  of  his  own  rendering. 
The  need  of  these  translations  shows  the  popular  drift  of 
literature  at  the  time;  but  keen  as  the  demand  seems  to 
have  been,  there  is  nothing  mechanical  in  the  temper  with 
which  Caxton  prepared  to  meet  it.  A  natural,  simple- 
hearted  taste  and  enthusiasm,  especially  for  the  style  and 
forms  of  language,  breaks  out  in  his  curious  prefaces. 
"  Having  no  work  in  tiand,"  he  says  in  the  preface  to  his 
Eneid,  "  I  sitting  in  my  study  where  as  lay  many  divers 
pamphlets  and  books,  happened  that  to  my  hand  came  a 
little  book  in  French,  which  late  was  translated  out  of 
Latin  by  some  noble  clerk  of  France — which  book  is  named 
Eneydos,  and  made  in  Latin  by  that  noble  poet  and  great 
clerk  Vergyl — in  which  book  I  had  great  pleasure  by  rea- 
son of  the  fair  and  honest  termes  and  wordes  in  French 
which  I  never  saw  to-fore-like,  none  so  pleasant  nor  so 
well  ordered,  which  book  as  me  seemed  should  be  much 
requisite  for  noble  men  to  see,  as  well  for  the  eloquence  as 
the  histories ;  and  when  I  had  advised  me  to  this  said  book 
I  deliberated  and  concluded  to  translate  it  into  English, 
and  forthwith  took  a  pen  and  ink  and  wrote  a  leaf  or 
twain."  But  the  work  of  translation  involved  a  choice  of 
English  which  made  Caxton 's  work  important  in  the  his- 
tory of  our  language.  He  stood  between  two  schools  of 
translation,  that  of  French  affectation  and  English  ped- 
antry. It  was  a  moment  when  the  character  of  our  liter- 


62  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

ary  tongue  was  being  settled,  and  it  is  curious  to  see  in 
his  own  words  the  struggle  over  it  which  was  going  on  in 
Caxton's  time.  "  Some  honest  and  great  clerks  have  been 
with  me  and  desired  me  to  write  the  most  curious  terms 
that  I  could  find ;"  on  the  other  hand,  "  some  gentlemen  of 
late  blamed  me,  saying  that  in  my  translations  I  had  over 
many  curious  terms  which  could  not  be  understood  of  com- 
mon people,  and  desired  me  to  use  old  and  homely  terms 
in  my  translations."  "Fain  would  I  please  every  man," 
comments  the  good-humored  printer,  but  his  sturdy  sense 
saved  him  alike  from  the  temptations  of  the  court  and  the 
schools.  His  own  taste  pointed  to  English,  but  "to  the 
common  terms  that  be  daily  used"  rather  than  to  the  Eng- 
lish of  his  antiquarian  advisers.  "  I  took  an  old  book  and 
read  therein,  and  certainly  the  English  was  so  rude  and 
broad  I  could  not  well  understand  it,"  while  the  Old-Eng- 
lish charters  which  the  Abbot  of  Westminster  lent  as 
models  from  the  archives  of  his  house  seemed  "  more  like 
to  Dutch  than  to  English."  To  adopt  current  phraseology 
however  was  by  no  means  easy  at  a  time  when  even  the 
speech  of  common  talk  was  in  a  state  of  rapid  flux.  "  Our 
language  now  used  varieth  far  from  that  which  was  used 
and  spoken  when  I  was  born. "  Not  only  so,  but  the  tongue 
of  each  shire  was  still  peculiar  to  itself  and  hardly  intelli- 
gible to  men  of  another  county.  "  Common  English  that 
is  spoken  in  one  shire  varieth  from  another  so  much,  that 
in  my  days  happened  that  certain  merchants  were  in  a 
ship  in  Thames  for  to  have  sailed  over  the  sea  into  Zea- 
land, and  for  lack  of  wind  they  tarred  at  Foreland  and 
went  on  land  for  to  refresh  them.  And  one  of  them,  named 
Sheffield,  a  mercer,  came  into  a  house  and  asked  for  meat, 
and  especially  he  asked  them  after  eggs.  And  the  good 
wife  answered  that  she  could  speak  no  French.  And  the 
merchant  was  angry,  for  he  also  could  speak  no  French, 
but  would  have  eggs,  but  he  understood  him  not.  And 
then  at  last  another  said  he  would  have  eyren,  then  the 
good  wife  said  she  understood  him  well.  Lo !  what  should 


.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  63 

a  man  in  thesp  days  now  write,"  adds  the  puzzled  printer, 
"eggs  or  eyren?  certainly  it  is  hard  to  please  every  man 
by  cause  of  diversity  and  change  of  language."  His  own 
mother-tongue  too  was  that  of  "  Kent  in  the  Weald,  where 
I  doubt  not  is  spoken  as  broad  and  rude  English  as  in  any 
place  in  England ;"  and  coupling  this  with  his  long  absence 
in  Flanders  we  can  hardly  wonder  at  the  confession  he 
makes  over  his  first  translation,  that  "when  all  these  things 
came  to  fore  me,  after  that  I  had  made  and  written  a  five 
or  six  quires  I  fell  in  despair  of  this  work,  and  purposed 
never  to  have  continued  therein,  and  the  quires  laid  apart, 
and  in  two  years  after  labored  no  more  in  this  work. " 

He  was  still,  however,  busy  translating  when  he  died. 
All  difficulties  in  fact  were  lightened  by  the  general  interest 
which  his  labors  aroused.  When  the  length  of  the  "  Gol- 
den Legend"  makes  him  "  half  desperate  to  have  accom- 
plish it"  and  ready  to  "lay  it  apart,"  the  Earl  of  Arundel 
solicits  him  in  no  wise  to  leave  it  and  promises  a  yearly 
fee  of  a  buck  in  summer  and  a  doe  in  winter,  once  it  were 
done.  "  Many  noble  and  divers  gentle  men  of  this  realm 
came  and  demanded  many  and  often  times  wherefore  I 
have  not  made  and  imprinted  the  noble  hi  story  of  the  'San 
Graal. '  "  We  see  his  visitors  discussing  with  the  sagacious 
printer  the  historic  existence  of  Arthur,  Duchess  Marga- 
ret of  Somerset  lent  him  her  "  Blanchardine  and  Eglan- 
tine ;"  an  Archdeacon  of  Colchester  brought  him  his  trans- 
lation of  the  work  called  "Cato;"  a  mercer  of  London 
pressed  him  to  undertake  the  "  Royal  Book"  of  Philip  le 
Bel.  Earl  Rivers  chatted  with  him  over  his  own  transla- 
tion of  the  "Sayings  of  the  Philosophers."  Even  kings 
showed  their  interest  in  his  work;  his  "  Tully"  was  printed 
under  the  patronage  of  Edward  the  Fourth,  his  "  Order  of 
Chivalry"  dedicated  to  Richard  the  Third,  his  "  Facts  of 
Arms"  published  at  the  desire  of  Henry  the  Seventh.  Cax- 
ton  profited  in  fact  by  the  wide  literary  interest  which  was 
a  mark  of  the  time.  The  fashion  of  large  and  gorgeous 
libraries  had  passed  from  the  French  to  the  English  prince0 


64  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

of  his  day :  Henry  the  Sixth  had  a  valuable  collection  of 
books ;  that  of  the  Louvre  was  seized  by  Duke  Humphrey 
of  Gloucester  and  formed  the  basis  of  the  fine  library  which 
he  presented  to  the  University  of  Oxford.  Great  nobles 
took  an  active  and  personal  part  in  the  literary  revival. 
The  warrior,  Sir  John  Fastolf ,  was  a  well-known  lover  of 
books.  Earl  Rivers  was  himself  one  of  the  authors  of  the 
day ;  he  found  leisure  in  the  intervals  of  pilgrimages  and 
politics  to  translate  the  "  Sayings  of  the  Philosophers"  and 
a  couple  of  religious  tracts  for  Caxton's  press.  A  friend 
of  far  greater  intellectual  distinction,  however,  than  these 
was  found  in  John  Tiptoft,  Earl  of  Worcester.  He  had 
wandered  during  the  reign  of  Henry  the  Sixth  in  search  of 
learning  to  Italy,  had  studied  at  her  universities  and  be- 
come a  teacher  at  Padua,  where  the  elegance  of  his  Latinity 
drew  tears  from  the  most  learned  of  the  Popes,  Pius  the 
Second,  better  known  as  JEneas  Sylvius.  Caxton  can  find 
no  words  warm  enough  to  express  his  admiration  of  one 
"  which  in  his  time  flowered  in  virtue  and  cunning,  to 
whom  I  know  none  like  among  the  lords  of  the  temporal- 
ity in  science  and  moral  virtue."  But  the  ruthlessness  of 
the  Renascence  appeared  in  Tiptoft  side  by  side  with  its 
intellectual  vigor,  and  the  fall  of  one  whose  cruelty  had 
earned  him  the  surname  of  "  the  Butcher"  even  amid  the 
horrors  of  civil  war  was  greeted  with  sorrow  by  none  but 
the  faithful  printer.  "What  great  loss  was  it,"  he  says 
in  a  preface  printed  long  after  his  fall,  "  of  that  noble,  vir- 
tuous, and  well-disposed  lord ;  when  I  remember  and  ad- 
vertise his  life,  his  science,  and  his  virtue,  me  thinketh 
(God  not  displeased)  over  great  the  loss  of  such  a  man  con- 
sidering his  estate  and  cunning." 

Among  the  nobles  who  encouraged  the  work  of  Caxton 
was  the  King's  youngest  brother,  Richard  Duke  of  Glou- 
cester. Edward  had  never  forgiven  Clarence  his  desertion ; 
and  his  impeachment  in  1478  on  a.  charge  of  treason,  a 
charge  soon  followed  by  his  death  in  the  Tower,  brought 
Richard  nearer  to  the  throne.  Ruthless  and  subtle  as  Ed- 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  65 

ward  himself,  the  Duke  was  already  renowned  as  a  war- 
rior; his  courage  and  military  skill  had  been  shown  at 
Barnet  and  Tewkesbury;  and  at  the  close  of  Edward's 
reign  an  outbreak  of  strife  with  the  Scots  enabled  him  to 
march  in  triumph  upon  Edinburgh  in  1482.  The  sudden 
death  of  his  brother  called  Richard  at  once  to  the  front. 
Worn  with  excesses,  though  little  more  than  forty  years 
old,  Edward  died  in  the  spring  of  1483,  and  his  son  Ed- 
ward the  Fifth  succeeded  peacefully  to  the  throne.  The 
succession  of  a  boy  of  thirteen  woke  again  the  fierce  rival- 
ries of  the  court.  The  Woodvilles  had  the  young  King  in 
their  hands ;  but  Lord  Hastings,  the  chief  adviser  of  his 
father,  at  once  joined  with  Gloucester  and  the  Duke  of 
Buckingham,  the  heir  of  Edward  the  Third's  youngest  son 
and  one  of  the  greatest  nobles  of  the  realm,  to  overthrow 
them.  The  efforts  of  the  Queen-mother  to  obtain  the  re- 
gency were  foiled,  Lord  Rivers  and  two  Woodvilles  were 
seized  and  sent  to  the  block,  and  the  King  transferred  to 
the  charge  of  Richard,  who  was  proclaimed  by  a  great 
council  of  bishops  and  nobles  Protector  of  the  Realm.  But 
if  he  hated  the  Queen's  kindred  Hastings  was  as  loyal  as 
the  Woodvilles  themselves  to  the  children  of  Edward  the 
Fourth ;  and  the  next  step  of  the  two  Dukes  was  to  remove 
this  obstacle.  Little  more  than  a  month  had  passed  after 
the  overthrow  of  the  Woodvilles  when  Richard  suddenly 
entered  the  Council-chamber  and  charged  Hastings  with 
sorcery  and  attempts  upon  his  life.  As  he  dashed  his 
hand  upon  the  table  the  room  filled  with  soldiery.  "  I  will 
not  dine,"  said  the  Duke,  turning  to  the  minister,  "till  they 
have  brought  me  your  head."  Hastings  was  hurried  to 
execution  in  the  court-yard  of  the  Tower,  his  fellow-coun- 
sellors thrown  into  prison,  and  the  last  check  on  Richard's 
ambition  was  removed.  Buckingham  lent  him  his  aid  in 
a  claim  of  the  crown ;  and  on  the  twenty-fifth  of  June  the 
Duke  consented  after  some  show  of  reluctance  to  listen  to 
the  prayer  of  a  Parliament  hastily  gathered  together, 
which,  setting  aside  Edward's  children  as  the  fruit  of  an 


66  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

unlawful  marriage  and  those  of  Clarence  as  disabled  by 
his  attainder,  besought  him  to  take  the  office  and  title  of 
King. 

Violent  as  his  acts  had  been,  Richard's  career  had  as 
yet  jarred  little  with  popular  sentiment.  The  Woodvilles 
were  unpopular,  Hastings  was  detested  as  the  agent  of 
Edward's  despotism,  the  reign  of  a  child-king  was  gener- 
ally deemed  impossible.  The  country,  longing  only  fop 
peace  after  all  its  storms,  called  for  a  vigorous  and  active 
ruler;  and  Richard's  vigor  and  ability  were  seen  in  his 
encounter  with  the  first  danger  that  threatened  his  throne. 
The  new  revolution  had  again  roused  the  hopes  of  the 
Lancastrian  party.  With  the  deaths  of  Henry  the  Sixth 
and  his  son  all  the  descendants  of  Henry  the  Fourth  passed 
away ;  but  the  line  of  John  of  Gaunt  still  survived  in  the 
heir  of  the  Beauforts.  The  legality  of  the  royal  act  which 
barred  their  claim  to  the  crown  was  a  more  than  question- 
able one;  the  Beauforts  had  never  admitted  it,  and  the 
conduct  of  Henry  the  Sixth  in  his  earlier  years  points  to 
a  belief  in  their  right  of  succession.  Their  male  line  was 
extinguished  by  the  fall  of  the  last  Duke  of  Somerset  at 
Tewkesbury,  but  the  claim  of  the  house  was  still  main- 
tained by  the  son  of  Margaret  Beaufort,  the  daughter  of 
Duke  John  and  great-granddaughter  of  John  of  Gaunt. 
While  still  but  a  girl  Margaret  had  become  both  wife  and 
mother.  She  had  wedded  the  Earl  of  Richmond,  Edmund 
Tudor,  a  son  of  Henry  the  Fifth's  widow,  Katharine  of 
France,  by  a  marriage  with  a  Welsh  squire,  Owen  Tudor ; 
and  had  given  birth  to  a  son,  the  later  Henry  the  Seventh. 
From  very  childhood  the  life  of  Henry  had  been  a  troubled 
one.  His  father  died  in  the  year  of  his  birth ;  his  uncle 
and  guardian,  Jasper,  Earl  of  Pembroke,  was  driven  from 
the  realm  on  the  fall  of  the  House  of  Lancaster ;  and  the 
boy  himself,  attainted  at  five  years  old,  remained  a  pris- 
oner till  the  restoration  of  Henry  the  Sixth  by  Lord  War- 
wick. But  Edward's  fresh  success  drove  him  from  the 
realm,  and  escaping  to  Brittany  he  was  held  there,  halt- 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  6? 

guest,  half -prisoner,  by  its  Duke.  The  extinction  of  the 
direct  Lancastrian  line  had  given  Henry  a  new  importance. 
Edward  the  Fourth  never  ceased  to  strive  for  his  surren- 
der, and  if  the  Breton  Duke  refused  to  give  him  up,  his 
alliance  with  the  English  King  was  too  valuable  to  be  im- 
perilled by  suffering  him  to  go  free.  The  value  of  such  a 
check  on  Richard  was  seen  by  Lewis  of  France ;  and  his 
demands  for  Henry's  surrender  into  his  hands  drove  the 
Duke  of  Brittany,  who  was  now  influenced  by  a  minister 
in  Richard's  pay,  to  seek  for  aid  from  England.  In  June 
the  King  sent  a  thousand  archers  to  Brittany;  but  the 
troubles  of  the  Duchy  had  done  more  for  Henry  than 
Lewis  could  have  done.  The  nobles  rose  against  Duke 
and  minister ;  and  in  the  struggle  that  followed  the  young 
Earl  was  free  to  set  sail  as  he  would. 

He  found  unexpected  aid  in  the  Duke  of  Buckingham, 
whose  support  had  done  much  to  put  Richard  on  the  throne. 
Though  rewarded  with  numerous  grants  and  the  post  of 
Constable,  Buckingham's  greed  was  still  unsated;  and  on 
the  refusal  of  his  demand  of  the  lands  belonging  to  the 
earldom  of  Hereford  the  Duke  lent  his  ear  to  the  counsels 
of  Margaret  Beaufort,  who  had  married  his  brother,  Henry 
Stafford,  but  still  remained  true  to  the  cause  of  her  boy. 
Buckingham  looked  no  doubt  to  the  chance  of  fooling 
Yorkist  and  Lancastrian  alike,  and  of  pressing  his  own 
claims  to  the  throne  on  Richard's  fall.  But  he  was  in  the 
hands  of  subtler  plotters.  Morton,  the  exiled  Bishop  of 
Ely,  had  founded  a  scheme  of  union  on  the  disappearance 
of  Edward  the  Fifth  and  his  brother,  who  had  been  im- 
prisoned in  the  Tower  since  Richard's  accession  to  the 
throne,  and  were  now  believed  to  have  been  murdered  by 
his  orders.  The  death  of  the  boys  left  their  sister  Eliza- 
beth, who  had  taken  sanctuary  at  Westminster  with  her 
mother,  the  heiress  of  Edward  the  Fourth ;  and  the  scheme 
of  Morton  was  to  unite  the  discontented  Yorkists  with 
what  remained  of  the  Lancastrian  party  by  the  marriage 
of  Elizabeth  with  Henry  Tudor.  The  Queen-mother  and 


68  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

her  kindred  gave  their  consent  to  this  plan,  and  a  wide 
revolt  was  organized  under  Buckingham's  leadership.  In 
October,  1483,  the  Woodvilles  and  the  iradherente  rose  in 
Wiltshire,  Kent,  and  Berkshire,  the  Courtenays  in  Devon, 
while  Buckingham  marched  to  their  support  from  Wales. 
Troubles  in  Brittany  had  at  this  moment  freed  Henry 
Tudor,  and  on  the  news  of  the  rising  he  sailed  with  a  strong 
fleet  and  five  thousand  soldiers  on  board.  A  proclamation 
of  the  new  pretender  announced  to  the  nation  what  seems 
as  yet  to  have  been  carefully  hidden,  the  death  of  the  princes 
in  the  Tower.  But,  whether  the  story  was  believed  or  no, 
the  duration  of  the  revolt  was  too  short  for  it  to  tell  upon 
public  opinion.  Henry's  fleet  was  driven  back  by  a  storm, 
Buckingham  was  delayed  by  a  flood  in  the  Severn,  and  the 
smaller  outbreaks  were  quickly  put  down.  Richard  showed 
little  inclination  to  deal  roughly  with  the  insurgents. 
Buckingham  indeed  was  beheaded,  but  the  bulk  of  his  fol- 
lowers were  pardoned,  and  the  overthrow  of  her  hopes  rec- 
onciled the  Queen-mother  to  the  King.  She  quitted  the 
sanctuary  with  Elizabeth,  and  thus  broke  up  the  league  on 
which  Henry's  hopes  hung.  But  Richard  was  too  wary 
a  statesman  to  trust  for  safety  to  mere  force  of  arms.  He 
resolved  to  enlist  the  nation  on  his  side.  During  his 
brother's  reign  he  had  watched  the  upgrowth  of  public 
discontent  as  the  new  policy  of  the  monarchy  developed 
itself,  and  he  now  appealed  to  England  as  the  restorer  of 
its  ancient  liberties.  "We  be  determined,"  said  the  citi- 
zens of  London  in  a  petition  to  the  King,  "  rather  to  ad- 
venture and  to  commit  us  to  the  peril  of  our  lives  and  jeop- 
ardy of  death  than  to  live  in  such  thraldom  and  bondage 
as  we  have  lived  some  time  heretofore,  oppressed  and  in- 
jured by  extortions  and  new  impositions  against  the  laws 
of  God  and  man  and  the  liberty  and  laws  of  this  realm 
wherein  every  Englishman  is  inherited."  Richard  met 
the  appeal  by  convoking  Parliament  in  January,  1484,  and 
by  sweeping  measures  of  reform.  The  practice  of  extort- 
ing money  by  benevolences  was  declared  illegal,  while 


CEAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  69 

grants  of  pardons  and  remissions  of  forfeitures  reversed  in 
some  measure  the  policy  of  terror  by  which  Edward  at 
once  held  the  country  in  awe  and  filled  his  treasury.  Nu- 
merous statutes  broke  the  slumbers  of  Parliamentary  leg- 
islation. A  series  of  mercantile  enactments  strove  to  protect 
the  growing  interests  of  English  commerce.  The  King's 
love  of  literature  showed  itself  in  a  provision  that  no  stat- 
utes should  act  as  a  hindrance  "  to  any  artificer  or  merchant 
stranger,  of  what  nation  or  country  he  be,  for  bringing 
into  this  realm  or  selling  by  retail  or  otherwise  of  any 
manner  of  books,  written  or  imprinted."  His  prohibition 
of  the  iniquitous  seizure  of  goods  before  conviction  of 
felony  which  had  prevailed  during  Edward's  reign,  his 
liberation  of  the  bondmen  who  still  remained  unenfran- 
chised on  the  royal  domain,  and  his  religious  foundations 
show  Richard's  keen  anxiety  to  purchase  a  popularity  in 
which  the  bloody  opening  of  his  reign  might  be  forgotten. 
It  was  doubtless  the  same  wish  to  render  his  throne  pop- 
ular which  led  Richard  to  revive  the  schemes  of  a  war  with 
France.  He  had  strongly  remonstrated  against  his  brother's 
withdrawal  and  alliance  in  1475,  and  it  must  have  been 
rather  a  suspicion  of  his  warlike  designs  than  any  horror 
at  the  ruthlessness  of  his  ambition  which  led  Lewis  the 
Eleventh  on  his  death-bed  to  refuse  to  recognize  his  ac- 
cession. At  the  close  of  Edward  the  Fourth's  reign  the 
alliance  which-  had  bound  the  two  countries  together  was 
brought  to  an  end  by  the  ambition  and  faithlessness  of  the 
French  King.  The  war  between  Lewis  and  Maximilian 
ended  at  the  close  of  1482  through  the  sudden  death  of 
Mary  of  Burgundy  and  the  reluctance  of  the  Flemish  towns 
to  own  Maximilian's  authority  as  guardian  of  her  son, 
Philip,  the  heir  of  the  Burgundian  states.  Lewis  was  able 
to  conclude  a  treaty  at  Arras,  by  which  Philip's  sister, 
Margaret,  was  betrothed  to  the  Dauphin  Charles,  and 
brought  with  her  as  dower  the  counties  of  Artois  and  Bur- 
gundy. By  the  treaty  with  England  Charles  was  already 
betrothed  to  Edward's  daughter,  Elizabeth;  and  this  open 


70  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

breach  of  treaty  was  followed  by  the  cessation  of  the  sub- 
sidy which  had  been  punctually  paid  since  1475.  France 
in  fact  had  no  more  need  of  buying  English  neutrality. 
Galled  as  he  was,  Edward's  death  but  a  few  months  later 
hindered  any  open  quarrel,  but  the  refusal  of  Lewis  to  rec- 
ognize Richard  and  his  attempts  to  force  from  Brittany 
the  surrender  of  Henry  Tudor  added  to  the  estrangement 
of  the  two  courts ;  and  we  can  hardly  wonder  that  on  the 
death  of  the  French  King  only  a  few  months  after  his  ac- 
cession Richard  seized  the  opportunity  which  the  troubles 
at  the  French  court  afforded  him.  Charles  the  Eighth 
was  a  minor;  and  the  control  of  power  was  disputed  as  of 
old  between  the  Regent,  Anne  of  Beaujeu,  and  the  Duke 
of  Orleans.  Orleans  entered  into  correspondence  with 
Richard  and  Maximilian,  whom  Anne's  policy  was  pre- 
venting from  gaining  the  mastery  over  the  Low  Countries, 
and  preparations  were  making  for  a  coalition  which  would 
have  again  brought  an  English  army  and  the  young  Eng- 
lish King  on  to  the  soil  of  France.  It  was  to  provide 
against  this  danger  that  Anne  had  received  Henry  Tudor 
at  the  French  court  when  the  threat  of  delivering  him  up 
to  Richard  forced  him  to  quit  Brittany  after  the  failure 
of  his  first  expedition ;  and  she  met  the  new  coalition  by 
encouraging  the  Earl  to  renew  his  attack.  Had  Richard 
retained  his  popularity  the  attempt  must  have  ended  in  a 
failure  even  more  disastrous  than  before.  But  the  news 
of  the  royal  children's  murder  had  slowly  spread  through 
the  nation,  and  even  the  most  pitiless  shrank  aghast  before 
this  crowning  deed  of  blood.  The  pretence  of  a  constitu- 
tional rule  too  was  soon  thrown  off,  and  in  the  opening  of 
1485  a  general  irritation  was  caused  by  the  levy  of  benev- 
olences in  defiance  of  the  statute  which  had  just  been 
passed.  The  King  felt  himself  safe;  the  consent  of  the 
Queen-mother  to  his  contemplated  marriage  with  her 
daughter  Elizabeth  appeared  to  secure  him  against  any 
danger  from  the  discontented  Yorkists ;  and  Henry,  alone 
and  in  exile,  seemed  a  small  danger.  Henry  however  had 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  71 

no  sooner  landed  at  Milford  Haven  than  a  wide  conspiracy 
revealed  itself.  Lord  Stanley  had  as  yet  stood  foremost 
among  Richard's  adherents;  he  had  supported  him  in  the 
rising  of  1483  and  had  been  rewarded  with  Buckingham's 
post  of  Constable.  His  brother  too  stood  high  in  the  King's 
confidence.  But  Margaret  Beaufort,  again  left  a  widow, 
wedded  Lord  Stanley ;  and  turned  her  third  marriage,  as 
she  had  turned  her  second,  to  the  profit  of  her  boy.  A 
pledge  of  support  from  her  husband  explains  the  haste  with 
which  Henry  pressed  forward  to  his  encounter  with  the 
King.  The  treason,  however,  was  skilfully  veiled;  and 
though  defection  after  defection  warned  Richard  of  his 
danger  as  Henry  moved  against  him,  the  Stanleys  still  re- 
mained by  his  side  and  held  command  of  a  large  body  of 
his  forces.  But  the  armies  no  sooner  met  on  the  twenty- 
second  of  August  at  Bosworth  Field  in  Leicestershire  than 
their  treason  was  declared.  The  forces  under  Lord  Stan- 
ley abandoned  the  King  when  the  battle  began ;  a  second 
body  of  troops  under  the  Earl  of  Northumberland  drew 
off  as  it  opened.  In  the  crisis  of  the  fight  Sir  William 
Stanley  passed  over  to  Henry's  side.  With  a  cry  of  "  Trea- 
son !  treason !"  Richard  flung  himself  into  the  thick  of  the 
battle,  and  in  the  fury  of  his  despair  he  had  already  dashed 
the  Lancastrian  standard  to  the  ground  and  hewed  his  way 
into  the  presence  of  his  rival  when  he  fell  overpowered 
with  numbers,  and  the  crown  which  he  had  worn  and 
which  was  found  as  the  struggle  ended  lying  near  a  haw- 
thorn bush  was  placed  on  the  head  of  the  conqueror. 


VOL.  2 


CHAPTER  II. 

THE  REVIVAL  OF  LEARNING. 

1485—1514. 

STILL  young,  for  he  was  hardly  thirty  when  his  victory 
at  Bosworth  placed  him  on  the  throne,  the  temper  of  Henry 
the  Seventh  seemed  to  promise  the  reign  of  a  poetic  dreamer 
rather  than  of  a  statesman.  The  spare  form,  the  sallow 
face,  the  quick  eye,  lit  now  and  then  with  a  fire  that  told 
of  his  Celtic  blood,  the  shy,  solitary  humor  which  was  only 
broken  by  outbursts  of  pleasant  converse  or  genial  sarcasm, 
told  of  an  inner  concentration  and  enthusiasm ;  and  to  the 
last  Henry's  mind  remained  imaginative  and  adventurous. 
He  dreamed  of  crusades,  he  dwelt  with  delight  on  the 
legends  of  Arthur  which  Caxton  gave  to  the  world  in  the 
year  of  his  accession.  His  tastes  were  literary  and  artistic. 
He  called  foreign  scholars  to  his  court  to  serve  as  secreta- 
ries and  historiographers;  he  trained  his  children  in  the 
highest  cult  ire  of  their  day ;  he  was  a  patron  of  the  new 
printing  press,  a  lover  of  books  and  of  art.  The  chapel  at 
Westminster  which  bears  his  name  reflects  his  passion  for 
architecture.  But  life  gave  Henry  little  leisure  for  dreams 
or  culture.  From  the  first  he  had  to  struggle  for  sheer  life 
against  the  dangers  that  beset  him.  A  battle  and  treason 
had  given  him  the  throne ;  treason  and  a  battle  might  dash 
him  from  it.  His  claim  of  blood  was  an  uncertain  and 
disputable  one  even  by  men  of  his  own  party.  He  stood 
attainted  by  solemn  Act  of  Parliament ;  and  though  the 
judges  ruled  that  the  possession  of  the  crown  cleared  all 
attaint  the  stigma  and  peril  remained.  His  victory  had 
been  a  surprise;  he  could  not  trust  the  nobles;  of  fifty-two 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  73 

peers  he  dared  summon  only  a  part  to  the  Parliament  which 
assembled  after  his  coronation  and  gave  its  recognition  to 
his  claim  of  the  crown.  The  act  made  no  mention  of  hered- 
itary right,  or  of  any  right  by  conquest,  but  simply  declared 
"  that  the  inheritance  of  the  crown  should  be,  rest,  remain, 
and  abide  in  the  most  royal  person  of  their  sovereign  Lord, 
King  Henry  the  Seventh,  and  the  heirs  of  his  body  law- 
fulty  ensuing."  Such  a  declaration  gave  Henry  a  true 
Parliamentary  title  to  his  throne;  and  his  consciousness 
of  this  was  shown  in  a  second  act  which  assumed  him  to 
have  been  King  since  the  death  of  Henry  the  Sixth  and 
attainted  Richard  and  his  adherents  as  rebels  and  traitors. 
But  such  an  act  was  too  manifestly  unjust  to  give  real 
strength  to  his  throne;  it  was  in  fact  practically  undone 
in  1495  when  a  new  statute  declared  that  no  one  should 
henceforth  be  attainted  for  serving  a  de  facto  king ;  and 
BO  insecure  seemed  Henry's  title  that  no  power  acknowl- 
edged him  as  King  save  France  and  the  Pope,  and  the 
support  of  France — gained  as  men  believed  by  a  pledge  to 
abandon  the  English  claims  on  Normandy  and  Guienne — 
was  as  perilous  at  home  as  it  was  useful  abroad. 

It  was  in  vain  that  he  carried  out  his  promise  to  Morton 
and  the  Woodvilles  by  marrying  Elizabeth  of  York;  he 
had  significantly  delayed  the  marriage  till  he  was  owned 
as  King  in  his  own  right,  and  a  purely  Lancastrian  claim 
to  the  throne  roused  wrath  in  every  Yorkist  which  no  afte* 
match  could  allay.  During  the  early  years  of  his  reign 
the  country  was  troubled  with  local  insurrections,  some  so 
obscure  that  they  have  escaped  the  notice  of  our  chroni- 
clers, some,  like  that  of  Lovel  and  of  the  Staffords,  general 
and  formidable.  The  turmoil  within  was  quickened  by 
encouragement  from  without.  The  Yorkist  sympathies  of 
the  Earl  of  Kildare,  the  deputy  of  Ireland,  offered  a  start- 
ing-point for  a  descent  from  the  west ;  while  the  sister  of 
Edward  the  Fourth,  the  Duchess  Margaret  of  Burgundy, 
a  fanatic  in  the  cause  of  her  house,  was  ready  to  aid  any 
Yorkist  attempt  from  Flanders.  A  trivial  rising  in  1486 


74  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

proved  to  be  the  prelude  of  a  vast  conspiracy  in  the  follow- 
ing year.  The  Earl  of  Warwick,  the  son  of  the  Duke  of 
Clarence  and  thus  next  male  heir  of  the  Yorkist  line,  had 
been  secured  by  Henry  as  by  Richard  in  the  Tower;  but 
in  the  opening  of  1487  Lambert  Simnel,  a  boy  carefully 
trained  for  the  purpose  of  this  imposture,  landed  under  his 
name  in  Ireland.  The  whole  island  espoused  Simnel's 
cause,  the  Lord  Deputy  supported  him,  and  he  was  soon 
joined  by  the  Earl  of  Lincoln,  John  de  la  Pole,  the  son  of 
a  sister  of  Edward  the  Fourth  by  the  Duke  of  Suffolk,  and 
who  on  the  death  of  Richard's  son  had  been  recognized  by 
that  sovereign  as  his  heir.  Edward's  queen  and  the  Wood- 
villes  seem  to  have  joined  in  the  plot,  and  Margaret  sent 
troops  which  enabled  the  pretender  to  land  in  Lancashire. 
But  Henry  was  quick  to  meet  the  danger,  and  the  impos- 
tor's defeat  at  Stoke  near  Newark  proved  fatal  to  the  hopes 
of  the  Yorkists.  Simnel  was  taken  and  made  a  scullion 
in  the  King's  kitchen,  Lincoln  fell  on  the  field. 

The  victory  of  Stoke  set  Henry  free  to  turn  to  the  inner 
government  of  his  realm.  He  took  up  with  a  new  vigor 
and  fulness  the  policy  of  Edward  the  Fourth.  Parliament 
was  only  summoned  on  rare  and  critical  occasions.  It 
was  but  twice  convened  during  the  last  thirteen  years  of 
Henry's  reign.  The  chief  aim  of  the  King  was  the  accu- 
mulation of  a  treasure  which  should  relieve  him  from  the 
need  of  ever  appealing  for  its  aid.  Subsidies  granted  for 
the  support  of  wars  which  Henry  evaded  formed  the  base 
of  a  royal  treasure  which  was  swelled  by  the  revival  of 
dormant  claims  of  the  crown,  by  the  exaction  of  fines  for 
the  breach  of  forgotten  tenures,  and  by  a  host  of  petty  ex- 
tortions. Benevolences  were  again  revived.  A  dilemma 
of  Henry's  minister,  which  received  the  name  of  "Mor- 
ton's fork,"  extorted  gifts  to  the  exchequer  from  men  who 
lived  handsomely  on  the  ground  that  their  wealth  was 
manifest,  and  from  those  who  lived  plainly  on  the  plea  that 
economy  had  made  them  wealthy.  Still  greater  sums  were 
drawn  from  those  who  were  compromised  in  the  revolts 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  75 

which  chequered  the  King's  rule.  It  was  with  his  own 
hand  that  Henry  indorsed  the  rolls  of  fines  imposed  after 
every  insurrection.  So  successful  were  these  efforts  that 
at  the  end  of  his  reign  the  King  bequeathed  a  hoard  of  two 
millions  to  his  successor.  The  same  imitation  of  Edward's 
policy  was  seen  in  Henry's  civil  government.  Broken  as 
was  the  strength  of  the  baronage,  there  still  remained  lords 
whom  the  new  monarch  watched  with  a  jealous  solicitude. 
Their  power  lay  in  the  hosts  of  disorderly  retainers  who 
swarmed  round  their  houses,  ready  to  furnish  a  force  in 
case  of  revolt,  while  in  peace  they  became  centres  of  out- 
rage and  defiance  to  the  law.  Edward  had  ordered  the 
dissolution  of  these  military  households  in  his  Statute  of 
Liveries,  and  the  statute  was  enforced  by  Henry  with  the 
utmost  severity.  On  a  visit  to  the  Earl  of  Oxford,  one  of 
the  most  devoted  adherents  of  the  Lancastrian  cause,  the 
King  found  two  long  lines  of  liveried  retainers  drawn  up 
to  receive  him.  "I  thank  you  for  your  good  cheer,  my 
Lord,"  said  Henry  as  they  parted,  "but  I  may  not  endure 
to  have  my  laws  broken  in  my  sight.  My  attorney  must 
speak  with  you."  The  Earl  was  glad  to  escape  with  a 
fine  of  £10,000.  It  was  with  a  special  view  to  the  suppres- 
sion of  this  danger  that  Henry  employed  the  criminal  ju- 
risdiction of  the  royal  Council.  The  King  in  his  Council 
had  always  asserted  a  right  in  the  last  resort  to  enforce 
justice  and  peace  by  dealing  with  offenders  too  strong  to 
be  dealt  with  by  his  ordinary  courts.  Henry  systematized 
this  occasional  jurisdiction  by  appointing  in  1486  a  com- 
mittee of  his  Council  as  a  regular  court,  to  which  the  place 
where  it  usually  sat  gave  the  name  of  the  Court  of  Star 
Chamber.  The  King's  aim  was  probably  little  more  than 
a  purpose  to  enforce  order  on  the  land  by  bringing  the  great 
nobles  before  his  own  judgment  seat;  but  the  establish- 
ment of  the  court  as  a  regular  and  no  longer  an  exceptional 
tribunal,  whose  traditional  powers  were  confirmed  by  Par- 
liamentary statute,  and  where  the  absence  of  a  jury  can- 
celled the  prisoner's  right  to  be  tried  by  his  peers,  furnished 


76  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

his  son  with  an  instrument  of  tyranny  which  laid  justice 
at  the  feet  of  the  monarchy. 

In  his  foreign  policy  Henry  like  Edward  clung  to  a 
system  of  peace.  His  aim  was  to  keep  England  apart, 
independent  of  the  two  great  continental  powers  which 
during  the  Wars  of  the  Roses  had  made  revolutions  at 
their  will.  Peace  indeed  was  what  Henry  needed,  whether 
for  the  general  welfare  of  the  land,  or  for  the  building  up 
of  his  own  system  of  rule.  Peace,  however,  was  hard  to 
win.  The  old  quarrel  with  France  seemed  indeed  at  an 
end ;  for  it  was  Henry's  pledge  of  friendship  which  had 
bought  the  French  aid  that  enabled  him  to  mount  the 
throne.  But  in  England  itself  hatred  of  the  French  burned 
fiercely  as  ever;  and  the  growth  of  the  French  monarchy 
in  extent  and  power  through  the  policy  of  Lewis  the  Elev- 
enth, his  extinction  of  the  great  feudatories,  and  the  admin- 
istrative centralization  he  introduced,  made  even  the  cool- 
est English  statesman  look  on  it  as  a  danger  to  the  realm. 
Only  Brittany  broke  the  long  stretch  of  French  coast  which 
fronted  England ;  and  the  steady  refusal  of  Edward  the 
Fourth  to  suffer  Lewis  to  attack  the  Duchy  showed  the 
English  sense  of  its  value.  Under  its  new  King,  however, 
Charles  the  Eighth,  France  showed  her  purpose  of  annex- 
ing Brittany.  Henry  contented  himself  for  a  while  with 
sending  a  few  volunteers  to  aid  in  resistance;  but  when 
the  death  of  the  Duke  left  Brittany  and  its  heiress,  Anne, 
at  the  mercy  of  the  French  King  the  country  called  at 
once  for  war.  Henry  was  driven  to  find  allies  in  the  states 
which  equally  dreaded  the  French  advance,  in  the  house 
of  Austria  and  in  the  new  power  of  Spain,  to  call  on  Par- 
liament for  supplies,  and  to  cross  the  Channel  in  1492 
with  twenty-five  thousand  men.  But  his  allies  failed  him ; 
a  marriage  of  Charles  with  Anne  gave  the  Duchy  irretriev- 
ably to  the  French  King;  and  troubles  at  home  brought 
Henry  to  listen  to  terms  of  peace  on  payment  of  a  heavy 
subsidy. 

Both  kings  indeed  were  eager  for  peace.     Charles  was 


CHAP.  ».]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461—1540.  77 


anxious  to  free  his  hands  for  the  designs  he  was  forming 
against  Italy.  What  forced  Henry  to  close  the  war  was 
the  appearance  of  a  new  pretender.  At  the  opening  of 
1492,  at  the  moment  when  the  King  was  threatening  a  de- 
scent on  the  French  coast,  a  youth  calling  himself  Richard, 
Duke  of  York,  landed  suddenly  in  Ireland.  His  story  of 
an  escape  from  the  Tower  and  of  his  bringing  up  in  Por- 
tugal was  accepted  by  a  crowd  of  partisans ;  but  he  was 
soon  called  by  Charles  to  France,  and  his  presence  there 
adroitly  used  to  wring  peace  from  the  English  King  as  the 
price  of  his  abandonment.  At  the  conclusion  of  peace  the 
pretender  found  a  new  refuge  with  Duchess  Margaret ;  his 
claims  were  recognized  by  the  House  of  Austria  and  the 
King  of  Scots;  while  Henry,  who  declared  the  youth's  true 
name  to  be  Perkin  Warbeck,  weakened  his  cause  by  con- 
flicting accounts  of  his  origin  and  history.  Fresh  York- 
ist plots  sprang  up  in  England.  The  Duchess  gathered  a 
fleet,  Maximilian  sent  soldiers  to  the  young  claimant's  aid, 
and  in  1495  he  sailed  for  England  with  a  force  as  large  as 
that  which  had  followed  Henry  ten  years  before.  But  he 
found  a  different  England.  Though  fierce  outbreaks  still 
took  place  in  the  north,  the  country  at  large  had  tasted  the 
new  s  weets  of  order  and  firm  government,  and  that  reac- 
tion of  feeling,  that  horror  of  civil  wars,  which  gave  their 
strength  to  the  Tudors  had  already  begun  to  show  its  force. 
The  pretender's  troops  landed  at  Deal,  only  to  be  seized  by 
the  country  folk  and  hung  as  pirates.  Their  leader  sailed 
on  to  Ireland.  Here  too,  however,  iie  found  a  new  state  of 
things.  Since  the  recall  of  Richard  and  his  army  in  1399 
English  sovereignty  over  the  island  had  dwindled  to  a 
shadow.  For  a  hundred  years  the  native  chieftains  had 
ruled  without  check  on  one  side  the  Pale,  and  the  lords  of 
the  Pale  had  ruled  with  but  little  check  on  the  other.  But 
in  1494  Henry  took  the  country  in  hand.  Sir  Edward 
Poynings,  a  tried  soldier,  was  dispatched  as  deputy  to 
Ireland  with  troops  at  his  back.  English  officers,  English 
judges  were  quietly  sent  over.  The  lords  of  the  Pale  were 


78  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

scared  by  the  seizure  of  their  leader,  the  Earl  of  Kildare. 
The  Parliament  of  the  Pale  was  bridled  by  a  statute  passed 
at  the  Deputy's  dictation ;  the  famous  Poynings'  Act,  by 
which  it  was  forbidden  to  treat  of  any  matters  save  those 
first  approved  of  by  the  English  King  and  his  Council. 
It  was  this  new  Ireland  that  the  pretender  found  when  he 
appeared  off  its  coast.  He  withdrew  in  despair,  and  Henry 
at  once  set  about  finishing  his  work.  The  time  had  not 
yet  come  when  England  was  strong  enough  to  hold  Ireland 
by  her  own  strength.  For  a  while  the  Lords  of  the  Pale 
must  still  serve  as  the  English  garrison  against  the  uncon- 
quered  Irish,  and  Henry  called  his  prisoner  Kildare  to  his 
presence.  "All  Ireland  cannot  rule  this  man,"  grumbled 
his  ministers.  "Then  shall  he  rule  all  Ireland,"  laughed 
the  King,  and  Kildare  returned  as  Lord  Deputy  to  hold 
the  country  loyally  in  Henry's  name. 

The  same  political  forecast,  winning  from  very  danger 
the  elements  of  future  security,  was  seen  in  the  King's 
dealings  with  Scotland.  From  the  moment  when  England 
finally  abandoned  the  fruitless  effort  to  subdue  it  the  story 
of  Scotland  had  been  a  miserable  one.  Whatever  peace 
might  be  concluded,  a  sleepless  dread  of  the  old  danger 
from  the  south  tied  the  country  to  an  alliance  with  France, 
and  this  alliance  dragged  it  into  the  vortex  of  the  Hundred 
Years'  War.  But  after  the  final  defeat  and  capture  of 
David  on  the  field  of  Neville's  Cross  the  struggle  died  down 
on  both  sides  into  marauding  forays  and  battles,  like  those 
of  Otterburn  and  Homildon  Hill,  in  which  alternate  victo- 
ries were  won  by  the  feudal  lords  of  the  Scotch  or  English 
border.  The  ballad  of  "  Chevy  Chase"  brings  home  to  us 
the  spirit  of  the  contest,  the  daring  and  defiance  which 
stirred  Sidney's  heart  "like  a  trumpet."  But  the  effect 
of  the  struggle  on  the  internal  development  of  Scotland 
was  utterly  ruinous.  The  houses  of  Douglas  and  of  March 
which  it  raised  into  supremacy  only  interrupted  their  strife 
with  England  to  battle  fiercely  with  one  another  or  to  co- 
erce their  King.  The  power  of  the  Crown  sank  in  fact 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  79 

into  insignificance  under  the  earlier  sovereigns  of  the  line 
of  Stuart  which  succeeded  to  the  throne  on  the  extinction 
of  the  male  line  of  Bruce  in  1371.  Invasions  and  civil 
feuds  not  only  arrested  but  even  rolled  back  the  national 
industry  and  prosperity.  The  country  was  a  chaos  of  dis- 
order and  misrule,  in  which  the  peasant  and  the  trader 
were  the  victims  of  feudal  outrage.  The  Border  became 
a  lawless  land,  where  robbery  and  violence  reigned  utterly 
without  check.  So  pitiable  seemed  the  state  of  the  king- 
dom that  at  the  opening  of  the  fifteenth  century  the  clans 
of  the  Highlands  drew  together  to  swoop  upon  it  as  a  cer- 
tain prey ;  but  the  common  peril  united  the  factions  of  the 
nobles,  and  the  victory  of  Harlaw  saved  the  Lowlands 
from  the  rule  of  the  Celt. 

A  great  ns*me  at  last  broke  the  line  of  the  Scottish  kings. 
Schooled  by  a  long  captivity  in  England,  James  the  First 
returned  to  his  realm  in  1424  to  be  the  ablest  of  her  rulers 
as  he  was  th«  first  of  her  poets.  In  the  twelve  years  of  a 
wonderful  r*.ign  justice  and  order  were  restored  for  the 
while,  the  !3«otch  Parliament  organized,  the  clans  of  the 
Highlands  assailed  in  their  own  fastnesses  and  reduced 
to  swear  fealty  to  the  "  Saxon"  king.  James  turned  to  as- 
sail the  great  houses ;  but  feudal  violence  was  still  too  strong 
for  the  hand  of  the  law,  and  a  band  of  ruffians  who  burst 
into  his  chamber  left  the  King  lifeless  with  sixteen  stabs 
in  his  body.  His  death  in  1437  was  the  signal  for  a  strug- 
gle between  the  House  of  Douglas  and  the  Crown  which 
lasted  through  half  a  century.  Order  however  crept  grad- 
ually in ;  the  exile  of  the  Douglases  left  the  Scottish  mon- 
arch supreme  in  the  Lowlands;  while  their  dominion  over 
the  Highlands  was  secured  by  the  ruin  of  the  Lords  of 
the  Isles.  But  in  its  outer  policy  the  country  still  followed 
in  the  wake  of  France ;  every  quarrel  between  French  King 
and  English  King  brought  danger  with  it  on  the  Scottish 
border;  and  the  war  of  Brittany  at  once  set  James  the 
Fourth  among  Henry's  foes.  James  welcomed  the  fugitive 
pretender  at  his  court  after  his  failure  in  Ireland,  wedded 


80  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

him  to  his  cousin,  and  in  1497  marched  with  him  to  the 
south.  Not  a  man  however  greeted  the  Yorkist  claimant, 
the  country  mustered  to  fight  him ;  and  an  outbreak  among 
his  nobles,  many  of  whom  Henry  had  in  his  pay,  called 
the  Scot-King  back  again.  Abandonment  of  the  pretender 
was  the  first  provision  of  peace  between  the  two  countries. 
Forced  to  quit  Scotland  the  youth  threw  himself  on  the 
Cornish  coast,  drawn  there  by  a  revolt  in  June,  only  two 
months  before  his  landing,  which  had  been  stirred  up  by 
the  heavy  taxation  for  the  Scotch  war,  and  in  which  a  force 
of  Cornishmen  had  actually  pushed  upon  London  and  only 
been  dispersed  by  the  King's  artillery  on  Blackheath. 
His  temper  however  shrank  from  any  real  encounter;  and 
though  he  succeeded  in  raising  a  body  of  Cornishmen  and 
marched  on  Taunton,  at  the  approach  of  the  royal  forces 
he  fled  from  his  army,  took  sanctuary  at  Beaulieu,  and 
surrendered  on  promise  of  life.  But  the  close  of  this  dan- 
ger made  no  break  in  Henry's  policy  of  winning  Scotland 
to  a  new  attitude  toward  his  realm.  The  lure  to  James 
was  the  hand  of  the  English  King's  daughter,  Margaret 
Tudor.  For  five  years  the  negotiations  dragged  wearily 
along.  The  bitter  hate  of  the  two  peoples  blocked  the  way, 
and  even  Henry's  ministers  objected  that  the  English 
crown  might  be  made  by  the  match  the  heritage  of  a  Scot- 
tish king.  "  Then,"  they  said,  "  Scotland  will  annex  Eng- 
land. "  "  No,"  said  the  King  with  shrewd  sense ;  "  in  such 
a  case  England  would  annex  Scotland,  for  the  greater  al- 
ways draws  to  it  the  less. "  His  steady  pressure  at  last  won 
the  day.  In  1502  the  marriage  treaty  with  the  Scot- King 
was  formally  concluded ;  and  quiet,  as  Henry  trusted,  se- 
cured in  the  north. 

The  marriage  of  Margaret  was  to  bring  the  House  of 
Stuart  at  an  after  time  to  the  English  throne.  But  results 
as  momentous  and  far  more  immediate  followed  on  the 
marriage  of  Henry's  sons.  From  the  outset  of  his  reign 
Henry  had  been  driven  to  seek  the  friendship  and  alliance 
of  Spain.  Though  his  policy  to  the  last  remained  one  of 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  81 

peace,  yet  the  acquisition  of  Brittany  forced  him  to  guard 
against  attack  from  France  and  the  mastery  of  the  Channel 
which  the  possession  of  the  Breton  ports  was  likely  to  give 
to  the  French  fleet.  The  same  dread  of  French  attack 
drew  Ferdinand  of  Aragon  and  Isabel  of  Castile,  whose 
marriage  was  building  up  the  new  monarchy  of  Spain,  to 
the  side  of  the  English  King;  and  only  a  few  years  after 
his  accession  they  offered  the  hand  of  their  daughter  Cath- 
arine for  his  eldest  son.  But  the  invasion  of  Italy  by 
Charles  the  Eighth  drew  French  ambition  to  a  distant 
strife,  and  once  delivered  from  the  pressure  of  immediate 
danger  Henry  held  warily  back  from  a  close  connection 
with  the  Spanish  realms  which  might  have  involved  him 
in  continental  wars.  It  was  not  till  1501  that  the  mar- 
riage-treaty was  really  carried  out.  The  Low  Countries 
had  now  passed  to  the  son  of  Mary  of  Burgundy  by  her 
husband  Maximilian,  the  Austrian  Archduke  Philip.  The 
Yorkist  sympathies  of  the  Duchess  Margaret  were  shared 
by  Philip,  and  Flanders  had  till  now  been  the  starting- 
point  of  the  pretenders  who  had  threatened  Henry's  crown 
But  Philip's  marriage  with  Juana,  the  daughter  of  Ferdi- 
nand and  Isabel,  bound  him  to  the  cause  of  Spain,  and  it 
was  to  secure  his  throne  by  winning  Philip's  alliance,  as 
well  as  to  gain  in  the  friendship  of  the  Low  Countries  a 
fresh  check  upon  French  attack,  that  Henry  yielded  to  Fer- 
dinand's renewed  demand  for  the  union  of  Arthur  and 
Catharine.  The  match  was  made  in  blood.  Henry's  own 
temper  was  merciful  and  even  generous;  he  punished  re- 
bellion for  the  most  part  by  fines  rather  than  bloodshed, 
and  he  had  been  content  to  imprison  or  degrade  his  rivals. 
But  the  Spanish  ruthlessness  would  see  no  living  claimant 
left  to  endanger  Catharine's  throne,  and  Perkin  Warbeck 
and  the  Earl  of  Warwick  were  put  to  death  on  a  charge 
of  conspiracy  before  the  landing  of  the  bride. 

Catharine,  however,  was  widow  almost  as  soon  as  wife, 
for  only  three  months  after  his  wedding  Arthur  sickened 
and  died.  But  a  contest  with  France  for  Southern  Italy, 


82  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

which  Ferdinand  claimed  as  king  of  Aragon,  now  made 
the  friendship  of  England  more  precious  than  ever  to  the 
Spanish  sovereigns;  and  Isabel  at  once  pressed  for  her 
daughter's  union  with  the  King's  second  son,  Henry, 
whom  his  brother's  death  left  heir  to  the  throne.  Such 
a  union  with  a  husband's  brother  startled  the  English  sov- 
ereign. In  his  anxiety,  however,  to  avoid  a  breach  with 
Spain  he  suffered  Henry  to  be  betrothed  to  Catharine,  and 
threw  the  burden  of  decision  on  Rome.  As  he  expected, 
Julius  the  Second  declared  that  if  the  first  marriage  had 
been  completed  to  allow  the  second  was  beyond  even  the 
Papal  power.  But  the  victories  of  Spain  in  Southern  Italy 
enabled  Isabel  to  put  fresh  pressure  on  the  Pope,  and  on  a 
denial  being  given  of  the  consummation  of  the  earlier  mar- 
riage Julius  was  at  last  brought  to  sign  a  bull  legitimating 
the  later  one.  Henry,  however,  still  shrank  from  any  real 
union.  His  aim  was  neither  to  complete  the  marriage, 
which  would  have  alienated  France,  nor  to  wholly  break 
it  off  and  so  alienate  Spain.  A  balanced  position  between 
the  two  battling  powers  allowed  him  to  remain  at  peace,  to 
maintain  an  independent  policy,  and  to  pursue  his  system 
of  home-government.  He  met  the  bull  therefore  by  com- 
pelling his  son  to  enter  a  secret  protest  against  the  validity 
of  his  betrothal ;  and  Catharine  remained  through  the  later 
years  of  his  reign  at  the  English  court  betrothed  but  un- 
married, sick  with  love-longing  and  baffled  pride. 

But  great  as  were  the  issues  of  Henry's  policy,  it  shrinks 
into  littleness  if  we  turn  from  it  to  the  weighty  movements 
which  were  now  stirring  the  minds  of  men.  The  world 
was  passing  through  changes  more  momentous  than  any 
it  had  witnessed  since  the  victory  of  Christianity  and  the 
fall  of  the  Roman  Empire.  Its  physical  bounds  were  sud- 
denly enlarged.  The  discoveries  of  Copernicus  revealed  to 
man  the  secret  of  the  universe.  Portuguese  mariners 
doubled  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope  'and  anchored  their  mer- 
chant fleets  in  the  harbors  of  India.  Columbus  crossed 
ths  untraversed  ocean  to  add  a  New  World  to  the  Old, 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461—1540.  83 

Sebastian  Cabot,  starting  from  the  port  of  Bristol,  threaded 
his  way  among  the  icebergs  of  Labrador.  This  sudden 
contact  with  new  lands,  new  faiths,  new  races  of  men 
quickened  the  slumbering  intelligence  of  Europe  into  a 
strange  curiosity.  The  first  book  of  voyages  that  told  of 
the  Western  World,  the  travels  of  Amerigo  Vespucci, 
were  soon  "in  everybody's  hands."  The  "Utopia"  of 
More,  in  its  wide  range  of  speculation  on  every  subject  of 
human  thought  and  action,  tells  us  how  roughly  and  ut- 
terly the  narrowness  and  limitation  of  human  life  had  been 
broken  up.  At  the  very  hour  when  the  intellectual  energy 
of  the  Middle  Ages  had  sunk  into  exhaustion  the  capture 
of  Constantinople  by  the  Turks  and  the  flight  of  its  Greek 
scholars  to  the  shores  of  Italy  opened  anew  the  science  and 
literature  of  an  older  world.  The  exiled  Greek  scholars 
were  welcomed  in  Italy ;  and  Florence,  so  long  the  hom« 
of  freedom  and  of  art,  became  the  home  of  an  intellectual 
Kevival.  The  poetry  of  Homer,  the  drama  of  Sophocles, 
the  philosophy  of  Aristotle  and  of  Plato  woke  again  to  life 
beneath  the  shadow  of  the  mighty  dome  with  which  Bru- 
nelleschi  had  just  crowned  the  City  by  the  Arno.  All  the 
restless  energy  which  Florence  had  so  long  thrown  into 
the  cause  of  liberty  she  flung,  now  that  her  liberty  was 
reft  from  her,  into  the  cause  of  letters.  The  galleys  of  her 
merchants  brought  back  manuscripts  from  the  East  as  the 
most  precious  portion  of  their  freight.  In  the  palaces  of 
her  nobles  fragments  of  classic  sculpture  ranged  themselves 
beneath  the  frescoes  of  Ghirlandajo.  The  recovery  of  a 
treatise  of  Cicero's  or  a  tract  of  Sallust's  from  the  dust  of  a 
monastic  library  was  welcomed  by  the  group  of  statesmen 
and  artists  who  gathered  in  the  Rucellai  gardens  with  a 
thrill  of  enthusiasm.  Foreign  scholars  soon  flocked  over 
the  Alps  to  learn  Greek,  the  key  of  the  new  knowledge,  from 
the  Florentine  teachers.  Grocyn,  a  fellow  of  New  College, 
was  perhaps  the  first  Englishman  who  studied  under  the 
Greek  exile,  Chancondylas ;  and  the  Greek  lectures  which 
he  delivered  in  Oxford  on  his  return  in  1491  mark  the  open- 


84  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.        [BOOK  V. 

ing  of  a  new  period  in  our  history.  Physical  as  well  as 
literary  activity  awoke  with  the  re-discovery  of  the  teach- 
ers of  Greece;  and  the  continuous  progress  of  English  sci- 
ence may  be  dated  from  the  day  when  Linacre,  another 
Oxford  student,  returned  from  the  lectures  of  the  Florentine 
Politian  to  revive  the  older  tradition  of  medicine  by  his 
translation  of  Galen. 

But  from  the  first  it  was  manifest  that  the  revival  of  let- 
ters would  take  a  tone  in  England  very  different  from  the 
tone  it  had  taken  in  Italy,  a  tone  less  literary,  less  largely 
human,  but  more  moral,  more  religious,  more  practical  in 
its  bearings  both  upon  society  and  politics.  The  awaken- 
ing of  a  rational  Christianity,  whether  in  England  or  in 
the  Teutonic  world  at  large,  begins  with  the  Italian  studies 
of  John  Colet ;  and  the  vigor  and  earnestness  of  Colet  were 
the  best  proof  of  the  strength  with  which  the  new  move- 
ment was  to  affect  English  religion.  He  came  back  to 
Oxford  utterly  untouched  by  the  Platonic  mysticism  or 
the  semi -serious  infidelity  which  characterized  the  group 
of  scholars  round  Lorenzo  the  Magnificent.  He  was  hardly 
more  influenced  by  their  literary  enthusiasm.  The  knowl- 
edge of  Greek  seems  to  have  had  one  almost  exclusive  end 
for  him,  and  this  was  a  religious  end.  Greek  was  the  key 
by  which  he  could  unlock  the  Gospels  and  the  New  Testa- 
ment, and  in  these  he  thought  that  he  could  find  a  new 
religious  standing-ground.  It  was  this  resolve  of  Colet  to 
throw  aside  the  traditional  dogmas  of  his  day  and  to  dis- 
cover a  rational  and  practical  religion  in  the  Gospels  them- 
selves which  gave  its  peculiar  stamp  to  the  theology  of  the 
Renascence.  His  faith  stood  simply  on  a  vivid  realization 
of  the  person  of  Christ.  In  the  prominence  which  such  a 
view  gave  to  the  moral  life,  in  his  free  criticism  of  the 
earlier  Scriptures,  in  his  tendency  to  simple  forms  of  doc- 
trine and  confessions  of  faith,  Colet  struck  the  keynote  of 
a  mode  of  religious  thought  as  strongly  in  contrast  with 
that  of  the  later  Reformation  as  with  that  of  Catholicism 
itself.  The  allegorical  and  mystical  theology  on  which 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  85 

the  Middle  Ages  had  spent  their  intellectual  vigor  to  such 
little  purpose  fell  before  his  rejection  of  all  but  the  histori- 
cal and  grammatical  sense  of  the  Biblical  text.  In  his 
lectures  on  the  Romans  we  find  hardly  a  single  quotation 
from  the  Fathers  or  the  scholastic  teachers.  The  great 
fabric  of  belief  built  up  by  the  mediaeval  doctors  seemed 
to  him  simply  "the  corruptions  of  the  Schoolmen."  In 
the  life  and  sayings  of  its  Founder  he  saw  a  simple  and 
rational  Christianity,  whose  fittest  expression  was  the 
Apostles'  creed.  "About  the  rest,"  he  said  with  charac- 
teristic impatience,  "let  divines  dispute  as  they  will." 
Of  his  attitude  toward  the  coarser  aspects  of  the  current  re- 
ligion his  behavior  at  a  later  time  before  the  famous  shrine 
of  St.  Thomas  at  Canterbury  gives  us  a  rough  indication. 
As  the  blaze  of  its  jewels,  its  costly  sculptures,  its  elabo- 
rate metal- work  burst  on  Colet's  view,  he  suggested  with 
bitter  irony  that  a  saint  so  lavish  to  the  poor  in  his  life- 
time would  certainly  prefer  that  they  should  possess  the 
wealth  heaped  round  him  since  his  death.  With  petulant 
disgust  he  rejected  the  rags  of  the  martyr  which  were 
offered  for  his  adoration  and  the  shoe  which  was  offered 
for  his  kiss.  The  earnestness,  the  religious  zeal,  the  very 
impatience  and  want  of  sympathy  with  the  past  which  we 
see  in  every  word  and  act  of  the  man  burst  out  in  the  lec- 
tures on  St.  Paul's  Epistles  which  he  delivered  at  Oxford 
in  1496.  Even  to  the  most  critical  among  his  hearers  he 
seemed  "  like  one  inspired,  raised  in  voice,  eye,  his  whole 
countenance  and  mien,  out  of  himself." 

Severe  as  was  the  outer  life  of  the  new  teacher,  a  severity 
marked  by  his  plain  black  robe  and  the  frugal  table  which 
he  preserved  amidst  his  later  dignities,  his  lively  conver- 
sation, his  frank  simplicity,  the  purity  and  nobleness  of 
his  life,  even  the  keen  outbursts  of  his  troublesome  temper, 
endeared  him  to  a  group  of  scholars,  foremost  among  whom 
stood  Erasmus  and  Thomas  More.  "  Greece  has  crossed 
the  Alps,"  cried  the  exiled  Argyropulos  on  hearing  a  trans- 
lation of  Thucydides  by  the  German  Reuchlin;  but  the 


86  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

glory,  whether  of  Reuchlin  or  of  the  Teutonic  scholars 
who  followed  him,  was  soon  eclipsed  by  that  of  Erasmus. 
His  enormous  industry,  the  vast  store  of  classical  learning 
which  he  gradually  accumulated,  Erasmus  shared  with 
others  of  his  day.  In  patristic  study  he  may  have  stood 
beneath  Luther ;  in  originality  and  profoundness  of  thought 
he  was  certainly  inferior  to  More.  His  theology,  though 
he  made  a  greater  mark  on  the  world  by  it  than  even  by 
his  scholarship,  he  derived  almost  without  change  from 
Colet.  But  his  combination  of  vast  learning  with  keen 
observation,  of  acuteness  of  remark  with  a  lively  fancy,  of 
genial  wit  with  a  perfect  good  sense — his  union  of  as  sin- 
cere a  piety  and  as  profound  a  zeal  for  rational  religion  as 
Colet's  with  a  dispassionate  fairness  towards  older  faiths, 
a  large  love  of  secular  culture,  and  a  genial  freedom  and 
play  of  mind — this  union  was  his  own,  and  it  was  through 
this  that  Erasmus  embodied  for  the  Teutonic  peoples  the 
quickening  influence  of  the  New  Learning  during  the  long 
scholar  life  which  began  at  Paris  and  ended  amid  sorrow 
and  darkness  at  Basle.  At  the  time  of  Colet's  return  from 
Italy  Erasmus  was  young  and  comparatively  unknown, 
but  the  chivalrous  enthusiasm  of  the  new  movement  breaks 
out  in  his  letters  from  Paris,  whither  he  had  wandered  as 
a  scholar.  "  I  have  given  up  my  whole  soul  to  Greek 
learning,"  he  writes,  "and  as  soon  as  I  get  any  money  I 
shall  buy  Greek  books — and  then  I  shall  buy  some  clothes." 
It  was  in  despair  of  reaching  Italy  that  the  young  scholar 
made  his  way  in  1499  to  Oxford,  as  the  one  place  on  this 
side  the  Alps  where  he  would  be  enabled  through  the  teach- 
ing of  Grocyn  to  acquire  a  knowledge  of  Greek.  But  he 
had  no  sooner  arrived  there  than  all  feeling  of  regret  van- 
ished away.  "I  have  found  in  Oxford,"  he  writes,  "so 
much  polish  and  learning  that  now  I  hardly  care  about 
going  to  Italy  at  all,  save  for  the  sake  of  having  been  there. 
When  I  listen  to  my  friend  Colet  it  seems  like  listening  to 
Plato  himself.  Who  does  not  wonder  at  the  wide  range 
of  Grocyn's  knowledge?  What  can  be  more  searching, 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  87 

deep,  and  refined  than  the  judgment  of  Linacre?  When 
did  Nature  mould  a  temper  more  gentle,  endearing,  and 
happy  than  the  temper  of  Thomas  More?" 

But  the  new  movement  was  far  from  being  bounded  by 
the  walls  of  Oxford.  The  printing  press  was  making  let- 
ters the  common  property  of  all.  In  the  last  thirty  years 
of  the  fifteenth  century  ten  thousand  editions  of  books  and 
pamphlets  are  said  to  have  been  published  throughout 
Europe,  the  most  important  half  of  them  of  course  in  Italy. 
All  the  Latin  authors  were  accessible  to  every  student  be- 
fore the  century  closed.  Almost  all  the  more  valuable 
authors  of  Greece  were  published  in  the  twenty  years  that 
followed.  The  profound  influence  of  this  burst  of  the  two 
great  classic  literatures  on  the  world  at  once  made  itself 
felt.  "For  the  first  time,"  to  use  the  picturesque  phrase 
of  M.  Taine,  "  men  opened  their  eyes  and  saw. "  The  hu- 
man mind  seemed  to  gather  new  energies  at  the  sight  of 
the  vast  field  which  opened  before  it.  It  attacked  every 
province  of  knowledge,  and  in  a  few  years  it  transformed 
all.  Experimental  science,  the  science  of  philology,  the 
science  of  politics,  the  critical  investigation  of  religious 
truth,  all  took  their  origin  from  this  Renascence — this 
"  New  Birth"  of  the  world.  Art,  if  it  lost  much  in  purity 
and  propriety,  gained  in  scope  and  in  the  fearlessness  of 
its  love  of  Nature.  Literature  if  crushed  for  the  moment 
by  the  overpowering  attraction  of  the  great  models  of 
Greece  and  Rome,  revived  with  a  grandeur  of  form,  a  large 
spirit  of  humanity,  such  as  it  has  never  known  since  their 
day.  In  England  the  influence  of  the  new  movement  ex- 
tended far  beyond  the  little  group  in  which  it  had  a  few 
years  before  seemed  concentrated.  The  great  churchmen 
became  its  patrons.  Langton,  Bishop  of  Winchester,  took 
delight  in  examining  the  young  scholars  of  his  episcopal 
family  every  evening,  and  sent  all  the  most  promising  of 
them  to  study  across  the  Alps.  Learning  found  a  yet 
warmer  friend  in  the  Archbishop  of  Canterbury. 

Immersed  as  Archbishop  Warham  was  in  the  business 


88  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

of  the  state,  he  was  no  mere  politician.  The  eulogies 
which  Erasmus  lavished  on  him  while  he  lived,  his  praises 
of  the  Primate's  learning,  of  his  ability  in  business,  his 
pleasant  humor,  his  modesty,  his  fidelity  to  friends,  may 
pass  for  what  eulogies  of  living  men  are  commonly  worth. 
But  it  is  difficult  to  doubt  the  sincerity  of  the  glowing  pic- 
ture which  he  drew  of  him  when  death  had  destroyed  all 
interest  in  mere  adulation.  The  letters  indeed  which  passed 
between  the  great  churchman  and  the  wandering  scholar, 
the  quiet,  simple-hearted  grace  which  amid  constant  in- 
stances of  munificence  preserved  the  perfect  equality  of  lit- 
erary friendship,  the  enlightened  piety  to  which  Erasmus 
could  address  the  noble  words  of  his  preface  to  St.  Jerome, 
confirm  the  judgment  of  every  good  man  of  Warham's 
day.  The  Archbishop's  life  was  a  simple  one;  and  an 
hour's  pleasant  reading,  a  quiet  chat  with  some  learned 
new-comer,  alone  broke  the  endless  round  of  civil  and  ec- 
clesiastical business.  Few  men  realized  so  thoroughly  as 
Warham  the  new  conception  of  an  intellectual  and  moral 
equality  before  which  the  old  social  distinctions  of  the 
world  were  to  vanish  away.  His  favorite  relaxation  was 
to  sup  among  a  group  of  scholarly  visitors,  enjoying  their 
fun  and  retorting  with  fun  of  his  own.  Colet,  who  had 
now  become  Dean  of  St.  Pauls  and  whose  sermons  were 
stirring  all  London,  might  often  be  seen  with  Grocyn  and 
Linacre  at  the  Primate's  board.  There  too  might  proba- 
bly have  been  seen  Thomas  More,  who,  young  as  he  was, 
was  already  famous  through  his  lectures  at  St.  Lawrence 
on  "  The  City  of  God."  But  the  scholar- world  found  more 
than  supper  or  fun  at  the  Primate's  board.  His  purse  was 
ever  open  to  relieve  their  poverty.  "  Had  I  found  such  a 
patron  in  my  youth,"  Erasmus  wrote  long  after,  "I  too 
might  have  been  counted  among  the  fortunate  ones."  It 
was  with  Grocyn  that  Erasmus  on  a  second  visit  to  Eng- 
land rowed  up  the  river  to  Warham's  board  at  Lambeth, 
and  in  spite  of  an  unpromising  beginning  the  acquaintance 
turned  out  wonderfully  well.  The  Primate  loved  him, 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  89 

Erasmus  wrote  home,  as  if  he  were  his  father  or  his  brother, 
and  his  generosity  surpassed  that  of  all  his  friends.  He 
offered  him  a  sinecure,  and  when  he  declined  it  he  be- 
stowed on  him  a  pension  of  a  hundred  crowns  a  year. 
When  Erasmus  wandered  to  Paris  it  was  Warham's  invi- 
tation which  recalled  him  to  England.  When  the  rest  of 
his  patrons  left  him  to  starve  on  the  sour  beer  of  Cambridge 
it  was  Warham  who  sent  him  fifty  angels.  "  I  wish  there 
were  thirty  legions  of  them,"  the  Primate  puns  in  his  good- 
humored  way. 

Real  however  as  this  progress  was,  the  group  of  schol- 
ars who  represented  the  New  Learning  in  England  still  re- 
mained a  little  one  through  the  reign  of  Henry  the  Seventh. 
But  the  King's  death  in  1509  wholly  changed  their  position. 
A  "New  Order,"  to  use  their  own  enthusiastic  phrase, 
dawned  on  them  in  the  accession  of  his  son.  Henry  the 
Eighth  had  hardly  completed  his  eighteenth  year  when 
he  mounted  the  throne;  but  his  manly  beauty,  his  bodily 
vigor,  and  skill  in  arms,  seemed  matched  by  a  frank  and 
generous  temper  and  a  nobleness  of  political  aims.  Pole, 
his  bitterest  enemy,  owned  in  later  days  that  at  the  begin- 
ning of  his  reign  Henry's  nature  was  one  "  from  which  all 
excellent  things  might  have  been  hoped. "  Already  in  stat- 
ure and  strength  a  king  among  his  fellows,  taller  than 
any,  bigger  than  any,  a  mighty  wrestler,  a  mighty  hunter, 
an  archer  of  the  best,  a  knight  who  bore  down  rider  after 
rider  in  the  tourney,  the  young  monarch  combined  with 
this  bodily  lordliness  a  largeness  and  versatility  of  mind 
which  was  to  be  the  special  characteristic  of  the  age  that 
had  begun.  His  fine  voice,  his  love  of  music,  his  skill  on 
lute  or  organ,  the  taste  for  poetry  that  made  him  delight 
in  Surrey's  verse,  the  taste  for  art  which  made  him  delight 
in  Holbein's  canvas,  left  room  for  tendencies  of  a  more 
practical  sort,  for  dabbling  in  medicine,  or  for  a  real  skill 
in  shipbuilding.  There  was  a  popular  fibre  in  Henry's 
nature  which  made  him  seek  throughout  his  reign  the  love 
of  his  people;  and  at  its  outset  he  gave  promise  of  a  more 


90  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

popular  system  of  government  by  checking  the  extortion 
which  had  been  practised  under  color  of  enforcing  forgot- 
ten laws,  and  by  bringing  his  father's  financial  ministers, 
Empson  and  Dudley,  to  trial  on  a  charge  of  treason.  His 
sympathies  were  known  to  be  heartily  with  the  New  Learn- 
ing; he  was  a  clever  linguist,  he  had  a  taste  that  never  left 
him  for  theological  study,  he  was  a  fair  scholar.  Even 
as  a  boy  of  nine  he  had  roused  by  his  wit  and  attainments 
the  wonder  of  Erasmus,  and  now  that  he  mounted  the 
throne  the  great  scholar  hurried  back  to  England  to  pour 
out  his  exultation  in  the  "Praise  of  Folly,"  a  song  of  tri- 
umph over  the  old  world  of  ignorance  and  bigotry  that 
was  to  vanish  away  before  the  light  and  knowledge  of  the 
new  reign.  Folly  in  his  amusing  little  book  mounts  a  pul- 
pit in  cap  and  bells,  and  pelts  with  her  satire  the  absurdi- 
ties of  the  world  around  her,  the  superstition  of  the  monk, 
the  pedantry  of  the  grammarian,  the  dogmatism  of  the 
doctors  of  the  schools,  the  selfishness  and  tyranny  of  Kings. 
The  irony  of  Erasmus  was  backed  by  the  earnest  effort 
of  Colet.  He  seized  the  opportunity  to  commence  the  work 
of  educational  reform  by  devoting  in  1510  his  private  for- 
tune to  the  foundation  of  a  Grammar  School  beside  St. 
Pauls.  The  bent  of  its  founder's  mind  was  shown  by  the 
image  of  the  Child  Jesus  over  the  master's  chair  with  the 
words  "  Hear  ye  Him"  graven  beneath  it.  "  Lift  up  your 
little  white  hands  for  me,"  wrote  the  Dean  to  his  scholars 
in  words  which  prove  the  tenderness  that  lay  beneath  the 
stern  outer  seeming  of  the  man, — "for  me  which  prayeth 
for  you  to  God."  All  the  educational  designs  of  the  re- 
formers were  carried  out  in  the  new  foundation.  The  old 
methods  of  instruction  were  superseded  by  fresh  grammars 
com  posed  by  Erasmus  and  other  scholars  for  its  use.  Lilly, 
an  Oxford  student  who  had  studied  Greek  in  the  East, 
was  placed  at  its  head.  The  injunctions  of  the  founder 
aimed  at  the  union  of  rational  religion  with  sound  learn- 
ing, at  the  exclusion  of  the  scholastic  logic,  and  at  the 
steady  diffusion  of  the  two  classical  literatures.  The  more 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  91 

bigoted  of  the  clergy  were  quick  to  take  alarm.  "No 
wonder,"  More  wrote  to  the  Dean,  "your  school  raises  a 
storm,  for  it  is  like  the  wooden  horse  in  which  armed 
Greeks  were  hidden  for  the  ruin  of  barbarous  Troy."  But 
the  cry  of  alarm  passed  helplessly  away.  Not  only  did 
the  study  of  Greek  creep  gradually  into  the  schools  which 
existed,  but  the  example  of  Colet  was  followed  by  a  crowd 
of  imitators.  More  grammar  schools,  it  has  been  said, 
were  founded  in  the  latter  years  of  Henry  than  in  the  three 
centuries  before.  The  impulse  only  grew  the  stronger  as 
the  direct  influence  of  the  New  Learning  passed  away. 
The  grammar  schools  of  Edward  the  Sixth  and  of  Eliza- 
beth, in  a  word  the  system  of  middle-class  education  which 
by  the  close  of  the  century  had  changed  the  very  face  of 
England,  were  the  outcome  of  Colet's  foundation  of  St. 
Pauls. 

But  the  "  armed  Greeks"  of  More's  apologue  found  a  yet 
wider  field  in  the  reform  of  the  higher  education  of  the 
country.  On  the  Universities  the  influence  of  the  New 
Learning  was  like  a  passing  from  death  to  life.  Erasmus 
gives  us  a  picture  of  what  happened  in  1516  at  Cambridge 
where  he  was  himself  for  a  time  a  teacher  of  Greek. 
"  Scarcely  thirty  years  ago  nothing  was  taught  here  but 
the  Parva  Logicalia,  Alexander,  those  antiquated  exer- 
cises from  Aristotle,  and  the  Qucestiones  of  Scotus.  As 
time  went  on  better  studies  were  added,  mathematics,  a 
new,  or  at  any  rate  a  renovated,  Aristotle,  and  a  knowl- 
edge of  Greek  Literature.  What  has  been  the  result?  The 
University  is  now  so  flourishing  that  it  can  compete  with 
the  best  universities  of  the  age."  William  Latimer  and 
Croke  returned  from  Italy  and  carried  on  the  work  of  Eras- 
mus at  Cambridge,  where  Fisher,  Bishop  of  Rochester, 
himself  one  of  the  foremost  scholars  of  the  new  movement, 
lent  it  his  powerful  support.  At  Oxford  the  Revival  met 
with  a  fiercer  opposition.  The  contest  took  the  form  of 
boyish  frays,  in  which  the  youthful  partisans  and  oppo- 
nents of  the  New  Learning  took  sides  as  Greeks  and  Tro- 


93  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.        [BOOK  V. 

jans.  The  young  King  himself  had  to  summon  one  of  its 
fiercest  enemies  to  Woodstock,  and  to  impose  silence  on  the 
tirades  which  were  delivered  from  the  University  pulpit. 
The  preacher  alleged  that  he  was  carried  away  by  the 
Spirit.  "Yes,"  retorted  the  King,  "by  the  spirit,  not  of 
wisdom,  but  of  folly."  But  even  at  Oxford  the  contest 
was  soon  at  an  end.  Fox,  Bishop  of  Winchester,  estab- 
lished the  first  Greek  lecture  there  in  his  new  college  of 
Corpus  Christi,  and  a  Professorship  of  Greek  was  at  a  later 
time  established  by  the  Crown.  "  The  students,"  wrote  an 
eye-witness  in  1520,  "rush  to  Greek  letters,  they  endure 
watching,  fasting,  toil,  and  hunger  in  the  pursuit  of  them." 
The  work  was  crowned  at  last  by  the  munificent  founda- 
tion of  Cardinal  College,  to  share  in  whose  teaching  Wol- 
sey  invited  the  most  eminent  of  the  living  scholars  of  Eu- 
rope, and  for  whose  library  he  promised  to  obtain  copies  of 
all  the  manuscripts  in  the  Vatican. 

From  the  reform  of  education  the  New  Learning  pressed 
on  to  the  reform  of  the  Church.  It  was  by  Warham's 
commission  that  Colet  was  enabled  in  1512  to  address  the 
Convocation  of  the  Clergy  in  words  which  set  before  them 
with  unsparing  severity  the  religious  ideal  of  the  new 
movement.  "Would  that  for  once,"  burst  forth  the  fiery 
preacher,  "  you  would  remember  your  name  and  profession 
and  take  thought  for  the  reformation  of  the  Church! 
Never  was  it  more  necessary,  and  never  did  the  state  of 
the  Church  need  more  vigorous  endeavors."  "We  are 
troubled  with  heretics,"  he  went  on,  "but  no  heresy  of 
theirs  is  so  fatal  to  us  and  to  the  people  at  large  as  the  vi- 
cious and  depraved  lives  of  the  clergy.  That  is  the  worst 
heresy  of  all. "  It  was  the  reform  of  the  bishops  that  must 
precede  that  of  the  clergy,  the  reform  of  the  clergy  that 
would  lead  to  a  general  revival  of  religion  in  the  people  at 
large.  The  accumulation  of  benefices,  the  luxury  and 
worldliness  of  the  priesthood,  must  be  abandoned.  The 
prelates  ought  to  be  busy  preachers,  to  forsake  the  Court 
and  labor  in  their  own  dioceses.  Care  should  be  taken  for 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  93 

the  ordination  and  promotion  of  worthy  ministers,  resi- 
dence should  be  enforced,  the  low  standard  of  clerical  mo- 
rality should  be  raised.  It  is  plain  that  the  men  of  the 
New  Learning  looked  forward,  not  to  a  reform  of  doctrine 
but  to  a  reform  of  life,  not  to  a  revolution  which  should 
sweep  away  the  older  superstitions  which  they  despised 
but  to  a  regeneration  of  spiritual  feeling  before  which  these 
superstitions  would  inevitably  fade  away.  Colet  was  soon 
charged  with  heresy  by  the  Bishop  of  London.  Warham 
however  protected  him,  and  Henry  to  whom  the  Dean  was 
denounced  bade  him  go  boldly  on.  "  Let  every  man  have 
his  own  doctor,"  said  the  young  King  after  a  long  inter- 
view, "  but  this  man  is  the  doctor  for  me !" 

But  for  the  success  of  the  new  reform,  a  reform  which 
could  only  be  wrought  out  by  the  tranquil  spread  of  knowl- 
edge and  the  gradual  enlightenment  of  the  human  con- 
science, the  one  thing  needful  was  peace;  and  peace  was 
already  vanishing  away.  Splendid  as  were  the  gifts  with 
which  Nature  had  endowed  Henry  the  Eighth,  there  lay 
beneath  them  all  a  boundless  selfishness.  "  He  is  a  prince, " 
said  Wolsey  as  he  lay  dying,  "  of  a  most  royal  courage ; 
sooner  than  miss  any  part  of  his  will  he  will  endanger  one- 
half  of  his  kingdom,  and  I  do  assure  you  I  have  often 
kneeled  to  him,  sometimes  for  three  hours  together,  to 
persuade  him  from  his  appetite  and  could  not  prevail. "  It 
was  this  personal  will  and  appetite  that  was  in  Henry  the 
Eighth  to  shape  the  very  course  of  English  history,  to  over- 
ride the  highest  interests  of  the  state,  to  trample  under  foot 
the  wisest  counsels,  to  crush  with  the  blind  ingratitude  of 
a  fate  the  servants  who  opposed  it.  Even  Wolsey,  while 
he  recoiled  from  the  monstrous  form  which  had  revealed 
itself,  could  hardly  have  dreamed  of  the  work  which  that 
royal  courage  and  yet  more  royal  appetite  was  to  accom- 
plish in  the  years  to  come.  As  yet  however  Henry  was 
far  from  having  reached  the  height  of  self-assertion  which 
bowed  all  constitutional  law  and  even  the  religion  of  his 
realm  beneath  his  personal  will.  But  one  of  the  earliest 


94  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

acts  of  his  reign  gave  an  earnest  of  the  part  which  the  new 
strength  of  the  crown  was  to  enable  an  English  king  to 
play.  Through  the  later  years  of  Henry  the  Seventh  Cath- 
arine of  Aragon  had  been  recognized  at  the  English  court 
simply  as  Arthur's  widow  and  Princess  Dowager  of  Wales. 
Her  betrothal  to  Prince  Henry  was  looked  upon  as  cancelled 
by  his  protest,  and  though  the  King  was  cautious  not  to 
break  openly  with  Spain  by  sending  her  home,  he  was  res- 
olute not  to  suffer  a  marriage  which  would  bring  a  break 
with  France  and  give  Ferdinand  an  opportunity  of  drag- 
ging England  into  the  strife  between  the  two  great  powers 
of  the  west. 

But  with  the  young  King's  accession  this  policy  of  cau- 
tious isolation  was  at  once  put  aside.  There  were  grave 
political  reasons  indeed  for  the  quick  resolve  which  bore 
down  the  opposition  of  counsellors  like  Warham.  As  cool 
a  head  as  that  of  Henry  the  Seventh  was  needed  to  watch 
without  panic  the  rapid  march  of  French  greatness.  In 
mere  extent  France  had  grown  with  a  startling  rapidity 
since  the  close  of  her  long  strife  with  England.  Guienne 
had  fallen  to  Charles  the  Seventh.  Provence,  Rousillon, 
and  the  Duchy  of  Burgundy  had  successively  swelled  the 
realm  of  Lewis  the  Eleventh.  Brittany  had  been  added 
to  that  of  Charles  the  Eighth.  From  Calais  to  Bayonne, 
from  the  Jura  to  the  Channel,  stretched  a  wide  and  highly 
organized  realm,  whose  disciplined  army  and  unrivalled 
artillery  lifted  it  high  above  its  neighbors  in  force  of  war. 
The  efficiency  of  its  army  was  seen  in  the  sudden  invasion 
and  conquest  of  Italy  while  England  was  busy  with  the 
pretended  Duke  of  York.  The  passage  of  the  Alps  by 
Charles  the  Eighth  shook  the  whole  political  structure  of 
Europe.  In  wealth,  in  political  repute,  in  arms,  in  let- 
ters, in  arts,  Italy  at  this  moment  stood  foremost  among 
the  peoples  of  Western  Christendom,  and  the  mastery 
which  Charles  won  over  it  at  a  single  blow  lifted  France  at 
once  above  the  states  around  her.  Twice  repulsed  from 
Naples,  she  remained  under  the  successor  of  Charles,  Lewis 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  95 

the  Twelfth,  mistress  of  the  Duchy  of  Milan  and  of  the 
bulk  of  northern  Italy ;  the  princes  and  republics  of  central 
Italy  grouped  themselves  about  her;  and  at  the  close  of 
Henry  the  Seventh's  reign  the  ruin  of  Venice  in  the  League 
of  Cambray  crushed  the  last  Italian  state  which  could  op- 
pose her  designs  on  the  whole  peninsula.  It  was  this  new 
and  mighty  power,  a  France  that  stretched  from  the  At- 
lantic to  the  Mincio,  that  fronted  the  young  King  at  his 
accession  and  startled  him  from  his  father's  attitude  of 
isolation.  He  sought  Ferdinand's  alliance  none  the  less 
that  it  meant  war,  for  his  temper  was  haughty  and  adven- 
turous, his  pride  dwelt  on  the  older  claims  of  England  to 
Normandy  and  Guienne,  and  his  devotion  to  the  papacy 
drew  him  to  listen  to  the  cry  of  Julius  the  Second  and  to 
long  like  a  crusader  to  free  Rome  from  the  French  pres- 
sure. Nor  was  it  of  less  moment  to  a  will  such  as  the 
young  King's  that  Catharine's  passionate  love  for  him  had 
roused  as  ardent  a  love  in  return. 

Two  months  therefore  after  his  accession  the  Infanta 
became  the  wife  of  Henry  the  Eighth.  The  influence  of 
the  King  of  Aragon  became  all-powerful  in  the  English 
council  chamber.  Catharine  spoke  of  her  husband  and 
herself  as  Ferdinand's  subjects.  The  young  King  wrote 
that  he  would  obey  Ferdinand  as  he  had  obeyed  his  own 
father.  His  obedience  was  soon  to  be  tested.  Ferdinand 
seized  on  his  new  ally  as  a  pawn  in  the  great  game  which 
he  was  playing  on  the  European  chess-board,  a  game 
which  left  its  traces  on  the  political  and  religious  map  of 
Europe  for  centuries  after  him.  It  was  not  without  good 
ground  that  Henry  the  Seventh  faced  so  coolly  the  menac- 
ing growth  of  France.  He  saw  what  his  son  failed  to  see, 
that  the  cool,  wary  King  of  Aragon  was  building  up  as 
quickly  a  power  which  was  great  enough  to  cope  with  it, 
and  that  grow  as  the  two  rivals  might  they  were  matched 
too  evenly  to  render  England's  position  a  really  dangerous 
one.  While  the  French  Kings  aimed  at  the  aggrandize- 
ment of  a  country,  Ferdinand  aimed  at  the  aggrandizement 

5  VOL.  2 


96  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  V. 

of  a  House.  Through  the  marriage  of  their  daughter  and 
heiress  Juana  with  the  son  of  the  Emperor  Maximilian, 
the  Archduke  Philip,  the  blood  of  Ferdinand  and  Isabel 
had  merged  in  that  of  the  House  of  Austria,  and  the  aim 
of  Ferdinand  was  nothing  less  than  to  give  to  the  Austrian 
House  the  whole  world  of  the  west.  Charles  of  Austria, 
the  issue  of  Philip's  marriage,  had  been  destined  from  his 
birth  by  both  his  grandfathers,  Maximilian  and  Ferdinand, 
to  succeed  to  the  Empire;  Franche  Comte  and  the  state 
built  up  by  the  Burgundian  Dukes  in  the  Netherlands  had 
already  passed  into  his  hands  at  the  death  of  his  father ; 
the  madness  of  his  mother  left  him  next  heir  of  Castile ; 
the  death  of  Ferdinand  would  bring  him  Aragon  and  the 
dominion  of  the  Kings  of  Aragon  in  southern  Italy;  that 
of  Maximilian  would  add  the  Archduchy  of  Austria,  with 
the  dependencies  in  the  south  and  its  hopes  of  increase  by 
the  winning  through  marriage  of  the  realms  of  Bohemia 
and  Hungary.  A  share  in  the  Austrian  Archduchy  indeed 
belonged  to  Charles's  brother,  the  Archduke  Ferdinand; 
but  a  kingdom  in  northern  Italy  would  at  once  compensate 
Ferdinand  for  his  abandonment  of  this  heritage  and  extend 
the  Austrian  supremacy  over  the  Peninsula,  for  Rome  and 
central  Italy  would  be  helpless  in  the  grasp  of  the  power 
which  ruled  at  both  Naples  and  Milan.  A  war  alone  could 
drive  France  from  the  Milanese,  but  such  a  war  might  be 
waged  by  a  league  of  European  powers  which  would  re- 
main as  a  check  upon  France,  should  she  attempt  to  hinder 
this  vast  union  of  states  in  the  hand  of  Charles  or  to  wrest 
from  him  the  Imperial  Crown.  Such  a  league,  the  Holy 
League  as  it  was  called  from  the  accession  to  it  of  the 
Pope,  Ferdinand  was  enabled  to  form  at  the  close  of  1511 
by  the  kinship  of  the  Emperor,  the  desire  of  Venice  and 
Julius  the  Second  to  free  Italy  from  the  stranger,  and  the 
warlike  temper  of  Henry  the  Eighth. 

Dreams  of  new  Cregys  and  Agincourts  roused  the  ardor 
of  the  young  King ;  and  the  campaign  of  1512  opened  with 
his  avowal  of  the  old  claims  on  his  "heritage  of  France.** 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461—1540.  97 

But  the  subtle  intriguer  in  whose  hands  he  lay  pushed 
steadily  to  his  own  great  ends.  The  League  drove  the 
French  from  the  Milanese.  An  English  army  which  landed 
under  the  Marquis  of  Dorset  at  Fontarabia  to  attack  Gui- 
enne  found  itself  used  as  a  covering  force  to  shield  Ferdi- 
nand's seizure  of  Navarre,  the  one  road  through  which 
France  could  attack  his  grandson 's  heritage  of  Spain .  The 
troops  mutinied  and  sailed  home ;  Scotland,  roused  again 
by  the  danger  of  France,  threatened  invasion ;  the  world 
scoffed  at  Englishmen  as  useless  for  war.  Henry's  spirit, 
however,  rose  with  the  need.  In  1513  he  landed  in  person 
in  the  north  of  France,  and  a  sudden  rout  of  the  French 
cavalry  in  an  engagement  near  Guinegate,  which  received 
from  its  bloodless  character  the  name  of  the  Battle  of  the 
Spurs,  gave  him  the  fortresses  of  Terouenne  and  Tournay. 
A  victory  yet  more  decisive  awaited  his  arms  at  home. 
A  Scotch  army  crossed  the  border,  with  James  the  Fourth 
at  its  head ;  but  on  the  ninth  of  September  it  was  met  by  an 
English  force  under  the  Earl  of  Surrey  at  Flodden  in  Nor- 
thumberland. James  "  fell  near  his  banner, "  and  his  army 
was  driven  off  the  field  with  heavy  loss.  Flushed  with 
this  new  glory,  the  young  King  was  resolute  to  continue 
the  war  when  in  the  opening  of  1514  he  found  himself  left 
alone  by  the  dissolution  of  the  League.  Ferdinand  had 
gained  his  ends,  and  had  no  mind  to  fight  longer  simply 
to  realize  the  dreams  of  his  son-in-law.  Henry  had  indeed 
gained  much.  The  might  of  France  was  broken.  The 
Papacy  was  restored  to  freedom.  England  had  again  fig- 
ured as  a  great  power  in  Europe.  But  the  millions  left  by 
his  father  were  exhausted,  his  subjects  had  been  drained 
by  repeated  subsidies,  and,  furious  as  he  was  at  the  treach- 
ery of  his  Spanish  ally,  Henry  was  driven  to  conclude  a 


To  the  hopes  of  the  New  Learning  this  sudden  outbreak 
of  the  spirit  of  war,  this  change  of  the  monarch  from  whom 
they  had  looked  for  a  "  new  order"  into  a  vulgar  conqueror, 
proved  a  bitter  disappointment.  Colet  thundered  from  the 


98  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  V. 

pulpit  of  St.  Pauls  that  "  an  unjust  peace  is  better  than  the 
justest  war,"  and  protested  that  "when  men  out  of  hatred 
and  ambition  fight  with  and  destroy  one  another,  they  fight 
under  the  banner,  not  of  Christ,  but  of  the  Devil."  Eras- 
mus quitted  Cambridge  with  a  bitter  satire  against  the 
"madness"  around  him.  "It  is  the  people,"  he  said,  in 
words  which  must  have  startled  his  age, — "it  is  the  people 
who  build  cities,  while  the  madness  of  princes  destroys 
them."  The  sovereigns  of  his  time  appeared  to  him  like 
ravenous  birds  pouncing  with  beak  and  claw  on  the  hard- 
won  wealth  and  knowledge  of  mankind.  "  Kings  who  are 
scarcely  men,"  he  exclaimed  in  bitter  irony,  "are  called 
'divine;'  they  are  'invincible'  though  they  fly  from  every 
battle-field;  'serene'  though  they  turn  the  world  upside 
down  in  a  storm  of  war;  'illustrious'  though  they  grovel 
in  ignorance  of  all  that  is  noble;  'Catholic'  though  they 
follow  anything  rather  than  Christ.  Of  all  birds  the  Eagle 
alone  has  seemed  to  wise  men  the  type  of  royalty,  a  bird 
neither  beautiful  nor  musical  nor  good  for  food,  but  mur- 
derous, greedy,  hateful  to  all,  the  curse  of  all,  and  with  its 
great  powers  of  doing  harm  only  surpassed  by  its  desire  to 
do  it."  It  was  the  first  time  in  modern  history  that  reli- 
gion had  formally  dissociated  itself  from  the  ambition  of 
princes  and  the  horrors  of  war,  or  that  the  new  spirit  of 
criticism  had  ventured  not  only  to  question  but  to  deny 
what  had  till  then  seemed  the  primary  truths  of  political 
order. 

But  the  indignation  of  the  New  Learning  was  diverted 
to  more  practical  ends  by  the  sudden  peace.  However  he 
had  disappointed  its  hopes,  Henry  still  remained  its  friend. 
Through  all  the  changes  of  his  terrible  career  his  home 
was  a  home  of  letters.  His  boy,  Edward  the  Sixth,  was  a 
fair  scholar  in  both  the  classical  languages.  His  daughter 
Mary  wrote  good  Latin  letters.  Elizabeth  began  every 
day  with  an  hour's  reading  in  the  Greek  Testament,  the 
tragedies  of  Sophocles,  or  the  orations  of  Demosthenes. 
The  ladies  of  the  court  caught  the  royal  fashion  and  were 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461—1540.  99 

found  poring  over  the  pages  of  Plato.  Widely  as  Henry's 
ministers  differed  from  each  other,  they  all  agreed  in  shar- 
ing and  fostering  the  culture  around  them.  The  panic  of 
the  scholar-group  therefore  soon  passed  away.  Colet  toiled 
on  with  his  educational  efforts;  Erasmus  forwarded  to 
England  the  works  which  English  liberality  was  enabling 
him  to  produce  abroad.  Warham  extended  to  him  as  gen- 
erous an  aid  as  the  protection  he  had  afforded  to  Colet. 
His  edition  of  the  works  of  St.  Jerome  had  been  begun 
under  the  Primate's  encouragement  during  the  great  schol- 
ar's residence  at  Cambridge,  and  it  appeared  with  a  dedi- 
cation to  the  Archbishop  on  its  title-page.  That  Erasmus 
could  find  protection  in  Warham 's  name  for  a  work  which 
boldly  recalled  Christendom  to  the  path  of  sound  Biblical 
criticism,  that  he  could  address  him  in  words  so  outspoken 
as  those  of  his  preface,  shows  how  fully  the  Primate  sym- 
pathized with  the  highest  efforts  of  the  New  Learning. 
Nowhere  had  the  spirit  of  inquiry  so  firmly  set  itself  against 
the  claims  of  authority.  "  Synods  and  decrees,  and  even 
councils,"  wrote  Erasmus,  "are  by  no  means  in  my  judg- 
ment the  fittest  modes  of  repressing  error,  unless  truth  de- 
pend simply  on  authority.  But  on  the  contrary,  the  more 
dogmas  there  are,  the  more  fruitful  is  the  ground  in  pro- 
ducing heresies.  Never  was  the  Christian  faith  purer  or 
more  undefiled  than  when  the  world  was  content  with  a 
single  creed,  and  that  the  shortest  creed  we  have."  It  is 
touching  even  now  to  listen  to  such  an  appeal  of  reason  and 
of  culture  against  the  tide  of  dogmatism  which  was  soon 
to  flood  Christendom  with  Augsburg  Confessions  and 
Creeds  of  Pope  Pius  and  Westminster  Catechisms  and 
Thirty-nine  Articles. 

But  the  principles  which  Erasmus  urged  in  his  "  Jerome" 
were  urged  with  far  greater  clearness  and  force  in  a  work 
that  laid  the  foundation  of  the  future  Reformation,  the 
edition  of  the  Greek  Testament  on  which  he  had  been  en- 
gaged at  Cambridge  and  whose  production  was  almost 
wholly  due  to  the  encouragement  and  assistance  he  re- 


100  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

ceived  from  English  scholars.  In  itself  the  book  was  a 
bold  defiance  of  theological  tradition.  It  set  aside  the 
Latin  version  of  the  Vulgate  which  had  secured  universal 
acceptance  in  the  Church.  Its  method  of  interpretation 
was  based,  not  on  received  dogmas,  but  on  the  literal  mean- 
ing of  the  text.  Its  real  end  was  the  end  at  which  Colet 
had  aimed  in  his  Oxford  lectures.  Erasmus  desired  to  set 
Christ  himself  in  the  place  of  the  Church,  to  recah1  men 
from  the  teaching  of  Christian  theologians  to  the  teach- 
ing of  the  Founder  of  Christianity.  The  whole  value  of 
the  Gospels  to  him  lay  in  the  vividness  with  which  they 
brought  home  to  their  readers  the  personal  impression  of 
Christ  himself.  "Were  we  to  have  seen  him  with  our 
own  eyes,  we  should  not  have  so  intimate  a  knowledge  as 
they  give  us  of  Christ,  speaking,  healing,  dying,  rising 
again,  as  it  were  in  our  very  presence."  All  the  supersti- 
tions of  mediaeval  worship  faded  away  in  the  light  of  this 
personal  worship  of  Christ.  "  If  the  footprints  of  Christ 
are  shown  us  in  any  place,  we  kneel  down  and  adore  them. 
Why  do  we  not  rather  venerate  the  living  and  breathing 
picture  of  him  in  these  books?  We  deck  statues  of  wood 
and  stone  with  gold  and  gems  for  the  love  of  Christ.  Yet 
they  only  profess  to  represent  to  us  the  outer  form  of  his 
body,  while  these  books  present  us  with  a  living  picture  of 
his  holy  mind."  In  the  same  way  the  actual  teaching  of 
Christ  was  made  to  supersede  the  mysterious  dogmas  of  the 
older  ecclesiastical  teaching.  "  As  though  Christ  taught 
such  subtleties,"  burst  out  Erasmus:  "subtleties  that  can 
scarcely  be  understood  even  by  a  few  theologians — or  as 
though  the  strength  of  the  Christian  religion  consisted  in 
man's  ignorance  of  it!  It  may  be  the  safer  course,"  he 
goes  on  with  characteristic  irony,  "to  conceal  the  state 
mysteries  of  kings,  but  Christ  desired  his  mysteries  to  be 
spread  abroad  as  openly  as  was  possible."  In  the  diffu- 
sion, in  the  universal  knowledge  of  the  teaching  of  Christ 
the  foundation  of  a  reformed  Christianity  had  still,  he 
Urged,  to  be  laid.  With  the  tacit  approval  of  the  Pri- 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  101 

mate  of  a  Church  which  from  the  time  of  Wyclif  had  held 
the  translation  and  reading  of  the  Bible  in  the  common 
tongue  to  be  heresy  and  a  crime  punishable  with  the  fire, 
Erasmus  boldly  avowed  his  wish  for  a  Bible  open  and  in- 
telligible to  all.  "  I  wish  that  even  the  weakest  woman 
might  read  the  Gospels  and  the  Epistles  of  St.  Paul.  I 
wish  that  they  were  translated  into  all  languages,  so  as  to 
be  read  and  understood  not  only  by  Scots  and  Irishmen, 
but  even  by  Saracens  and  Turks.  But  the  first  step  to  their 
being  read  is  to  make  them  intelligible  to  the  reader.  I 
long  for  the  day  when  the  husbandman  shall  sing  portions 
of  them  to  himself  as  he  follows  the  plough,  when  the 
weaver  shall  hum  them  to  the  tune  of  his  shuttle,  when 
the  traveller  shall  while  away  with  their  stories  the  weari- 
ness of  his  journey. "  From  the  moment  of  its  publication 
in  1516  the  New  Testament  of  Erasmus  became  the  topic 
of  the  day;  the  Court,  the  Universities,  every  household 
to  which  the  New  Learning  had  penetrated,  read  and  dis- 
cussed it.  But  bold  as  its  language  may  have  seemed, 
Warham  not  only  expressed  his  approbation,  but  lent  the 
work — as  he  wrote  to  its  author — "to  bishop  after  bishop." 
The  most  influential  of  his  suffragans,  Bishop  Fox  of  Win- 
chester, declared  that  the  mere  version  was  worth  ten  com- 
mentaries ;  one  of  the  most  learned,  Fisher  of  Rochester, 
entertained  Erasmus  at  his  house. 

Daring  and  full  of  promise  as  were  these  efforts  of  the 
New  Learning  in  the  direction  of  educational  and  relig- 
ious reform,  its  political  and  social  speculations  took  a  far 
wider  rage  in  the  <c  Utopia"  of  Thomas  More.  Even  in  the 
household  of  Cardinal  Morton,  where  he  had  spent  his  child- 
hood, More's  precocious  ability  had  raised  the  highest 
hopes.  "Whoever  may  live  to  see  it,"  the  gray-haired 
statesman  used  to  say,  "  this  boy  now  waiting  at  table  will 
turn  out  a  marvellous  man. "  We  have  seen  the  spell  which 
his  wonderful  learning  and  the  sweetness  of  his  temper 
threw  at  Oxford  over  Colet  and  Erasmus ;  and  young  as  he 
was,  More  no  sooner  quitted  the  University  than  he  was 


102  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

known  throughout  Europe  as  one  of  the  foremost  figures  in 
the  new  movement.  The  keen,  irregular  face,  the  gray  rest- 
less eye,  the  thin  mobile  lips,  the  tumbled  brown  hair,  the 
careless  gait  and  dress,  as  they  remain  stamped  on  the  can- 
vas of  Holbein,  picture  the  inner  soul  of  the  man,  his  vi- 
vacity, his  restless,  all-devouring  intellect,  his  keen  and 
even  reckless  wit,  the  kindly,  half-sad  humor  that  drew  its 
strange  veil  of  laughter  and  tears  over  the  deep,  tender  rev- 
erence of  the  soul  within.  In  a  higher,  because  in  a  sweeter 
and  more  lovable  form  than  Colet,  More  is  the  representa- 
tive of  the  religious  tendency  of  the  New  Learning  in  Eng- 
land. The  young  law-student  who  laughed  at  the  super- 
stition and  asceticism  of  the  monks  of  his  day  wore  a  hair 
shirt  next  his  skin,  and  schooled  himself  by  penances  for 
the  cell  he  desired  among  the  Carthusians.  It  was  char- 
acteristic of  the  man  that  among  all  the  gay,  profligate 
scholars  of  the  Italian  Renascence  he  chose  as  the  object 
of  his  admiration  the  disciple  of  Savonarola,  Pico  di  Mi- 
randola.  Free-thinker  as  the  bigots  who  listened  to  his 
daring  speculations  termed  him,  his  eye  would  brighten 
and  his  tongue  falter  as  he  spoke  with  friends  of  heaven 
and  the  after-life.  When  he  took  office,  it  was  with  the 
open  stipulation  "first  to  look  to  God,  and  after  God  to 
the  King." 

In  his  outer  bearing  indeed  there  was  nothing  of  the 
monk  or  recluse.  The  brightness  and  freedom  of  the  New 
Learning  seemed  incarnate  in  the  young  scholar  with  his 
gay  talk,  his  winsomeness  of  manner,  his  reckless  epi- 
grams, his  passionate  love  of  music,  his  omnivorous  read- 
ing, his  paradoxical  speculations,  his  gibes  at  monks,  his 
schoolboy  fervor  of  liberty.  But  events  were  soon  to  prove 
that  beneath  this  sunny  nature  lay  a  stern  inflexibility  of 
conscientious  resolve.  The  Florentine  scholars  penned  dec- 
lamations against  tyrants  while  they  covered  with  their 
flatteries  the  tyranny  of  the  house  of  Medici.  More  no 
sooner  entered  Parliament  in  1504  than  his  ready  argu- 
ment and  keen  sense  of  justice  led  to  the  rejection  of  the 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  103 

demand  for  a  heavy  subsidy.  "  A  beardless  boy,"  said  the 
courtiers, — and  More  was  only  twenty-six, — "has  disap- 
pointed the  King's  purpose;"  and  during  the  rest  of  Henry 
the  Seventh's  reign  the  young  lawyer  found  it  prudent  to 
withdraw  from  public  life.  But  the  withdrawal  had  little 
effect  on  his  buoyant  activity.  He  rose  at  once  into  re- 
pute at  the  bar.  He  wrote  his  K  Life  of  Edward  the  Fifth," 
the  first  work  in  which  what  we  may  call  modern  English 
prose  appears  written  with  purity  and  clearness  of  style 
and  a  freedom  either  from  antiquated  forms  of  expression 
or  classical  pedantry.  His  ascetic  dreams  were  replaced 
by  the  affections  of  home.  It  is  when  we  get  a  glimpse  of 
him  in  his  house  at  Chelsea  that  we  understand  the  en- 
dearing epithets  which  Erasmus  always  lavishes  upon 
More.  The  delight  of  the  young  husband  was  to  train  the 
girl  he  had  chosen  for  his  wife  in  his  own  taste  for  letters 
and  for  music.  The  reserve  which  the  age  exacted  from 
parents  was  thrown  to  the  winds  in  More's  intercourse 
with  his  children.  He  loved  teaching  them,  and  lured 
them  to  their  deeper  studies  by  the  coins  and  curiosities 
he  had  gathered  in  his  cabinet.  He  was  as  fond  of  their 
pets  and  their  games  as  his  children  themselves,  and  would 
take  grave  scholars  and  statesmen  into  the  garden  to  see 
his  girls'  rabbit-hutches  or  to  watch  the  gambols  of  their 
favorite  monkey.  "I  have  given  you  kisses  enough,"  he 
wrote  to  his  little  ones  in  merry  verse  when  far  away  on 
political  business,  "but  stripes  hardly  ever." 

The  accession  of  Henry  the  Eighth  drew  More  back  into 
the  political  current.  It  was  at  his  house  that  Erasmus 
penned  the  "Praise  of  Folly,"  and  the  work,  in  its  Latin 
title,  "Moria3  Encomium,"  embodied  in  playful  fun  his 
love  of  the  extravagant  humor  of  More.  He  was  already 
in  Henry's  favor;  he  was  soon  called  to  the  royal  court  and 
used  in  the  King's  service.  But  More  "  tried  as  hard  to 
keep  out  of  court, "  says  his  descendant,  "  as  most  men  try 
to  get  into  it."  When  the  charm  of  his  conversation  gave 
so  much  pleasure  to  the  young  sovereign  "  that  he  could 


104  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

not  once  in  a  month  get  leave  to  go  home  to  his  wife  or 
children,  whose  company  he  much  desired,  ...  he  began 
thereupon  to  dissemble  his  nature,  and  so,  little  by  little, 
from  his  former  mirth  to  dissemble  himself."  He  shared 
to  the  full  the  disappointment  of  his  friends  at  the  sudden 
outbreak  of  Henry's  warlike  temper,  but  the  Peace  again 
brought  him  to  Henry's  side  and  he  was  soon  in  the  King's 
confidence  both  as  a  counsellor  and  as  a  diplomatist.  It  was 
on  one  of  his  diplomatic  missions  that  More  describes  him- 
self as  hearing  news  of  the  Kingom  of  "  Nowhere."  "  On 
a  certain  day  when  I  had  heard  mass  in  Our  Lady's 
Church,  which  is  the  fairest,  the  most  gorgeous  and  curi- 
ous church  of  building  in  all  the  city  of  Antwerp  and  also 
most  frequented  of  people,  and  service  being  over  I  was 
ready  to  go  home  to  my  lodgings,  I  chanced  to  espy  my 
friend  Peter  Gilles  talking  with  a  certain  stranger,  a  man 
well  stricken  in  age,  with  a  black  sun-burnt  face,  a  large 
beard,  and  a  cloke  cast  trimly  about  his  shoulders,  whom 
by  his  favor  and  apparell  forthwith  I  judged  to  be  a  mar- 
iner." The  sailor  turned  out  to  have  been  a  companion  of 
Amerigo  Vespucci  in  those  voyages  to  the  New  World 
"that  be  now  in  print  and  abroad  in  every  man's  hand," 
and  on  More's  invitation  he  accompanied  him  to  his  house, 
and  "  there  in  my  garden  upon  a  bench  covered  with  green 
turves  we  sate  down,  talking  together"  of  the  man's  mar- 
vellous adventures,  his  desertion  in  America  by  Vespucci, 
his  wanderings  over  the  country  under  the  equinoctial 
line,  and  at  last  of  his  stay  in  the  Kingdom  of  "  Nowhere." 
It  was  the  story  of  "Nowhere,"  or  Utopia,  which  More 
began  in  1515  to  embody  in  the  wonderful  book  which  re- 
veals to  us  the  heart  of  the  New  Learning.  As  yet  the 
movement  had  been  one  of  scholars  and  divines.  Its  plans 
of  reform  had  been  almost  exclusively  intellectual  and  re- 
ligious. But  in  More  the  same  free  play  of  thought  which 
had  shaken  off  the  old  forms  of  education  and  faith  turned 
to  question  the  old  forms  of  society  and  politics.  From  a 
world  where  fifteen  hundred  years  of  Christian  teaching' 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461—1540.  105 

had  produced  social  injustice,  religious  intolerance,  and 
political  tyranny  the  humorist  philosopher  turned  to  a 
"  Nowhere"  in  which  the  mere  efforts  of  natural  human 
virtue  realized  those  ends  of  security,  equality,  brother- 
hood, and  freedom  for  which  the  very  institution  of  society 
seemed  to  have  been  framed.  It  is  as  he  wanders  through 
this  dreamland  of  the  new  reason  that  More  touches  the 
great  problems  which  were  fast  opening  before  the  modern 
world,  problems  of  labor,  of  crime,  of  conscience,  of  gov- 
ernment. Merely  to  have  seen  and  to  have  examined  ques- 
tions such  as  these  would  prove  the  keenness  of  his  intel- 
lect, but  its  far-reaching  originality  is  shown  in  the  solu- 
tions which  he  proposes.  Amidst  much  that  is  the  pure 
play  of  an  exuberant  fancy,  much  that  is  mere  recollec- 
tion of  the  dreams  of  bygone  dreamers,  we  find  again  and 
again  the  most  important  social  and  political  discoveries 
of  later  times  anticipated  by  the  genius  of  Thomas  More. 

In  some  points,  such  as  his  treatment  of  the  question  of 
Labor,  he  still  remains  far  in  advance  of  current  opinion. 
The  whole  system  of  society  around  him  seemed  to  him 
"nothing  but  a  conspiracy  of  the  rich  against  the  poor." 
Its  economic  legislation  from  the  Statute  of  Laborers  to 
the  statutes  by  which  the  Parliament  of  1515  strove  to  fix 
a  standard  of  wages  was  simply  the  carrying  out  of  such 
a  conspiracy  by  process  of  law.  "  The  rich  are  ever  striv- 
ing to  pare  away  something  further  from  the  daily  wages 
of  the  poor  by  private  fraud  and  even  by  public  law,  so 
that  the  wrong  already  existing  (for  it  is  a  wrong  that 
those  from  whom  the  State  derives  most  benefit  should  re- 
ceive least  reward)  is  made  yet  greater  by  means  of  the 
law  of  the  State. "  "  The  rich  devise  every  means  by  which 
they  may  in  the  first  place  secure  to  themselves  what  they 
have  amassed  by  wrong,  and  then  take  to  their  own  use 
and  profit  at  the  lowest  possible  price  the  work  and  labor 
of  the  poor.  And  so  soon  as  the  rich  decide  on  adopting 
these  devices  in  the  name  of  the  public,  then  they  become 
law."  The  result  was  the  wretched  existence  to  which 


106  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

the  labor  class  was  doomed,  "  a  life  so  wretched  that  even 
a  beast's  life  seems  enviable."  No  such  cry  of  pity  for 
the  poor,  of  protest  against  the  system  of  agrarian  and 
manufacturing  tyranny  which  found  its  expression  in  the 
Statute-book  had  been  heard  since  the  days  of  Piers  Plough- 
man. But  from  Christendom  More  turns  with  a  smile  to 
"Nowhere."  In  "Nowhere"  the  aim  of  legislation  is  to 
secure  the  welfare,  social,  industrial,  intellectual,  relig- 
ious, of  the  community  at  large,  and  of  the  labor-class  as 
the  true  basis  of  a  well-ordered  commonwealth.  The  end 
of  its  labor-laws  was  simply  the  welfare  of  the  laborer. 
Goods  were  possessed  indeed  in  common,  but  work  was 
compulsory  with  all.  The  period  of  toil  was  shortened  to 
the  nine  hours  demanded  by  modern  artisans,  and  the  ob- 
ject of  this  curtailment  was  the  intellectual  improvement 
of  the  worker.  "  In  the  institution  of  the  weal  public  this 
end  is  only  and  chiefly  pretended  and  minded  that  what 
time  may  possibly  be  spared  from  the  necessary  occupa- 
tions and  affairs  of  the  commonwealth,  all  that  the  citizens 
should  withdraw  from  bodily  service  to  the  free  liberty  of 
the  mind  and  garnishing  of  the  same.  For  herein  they 
conceive  the  felicity  of  this  life  to  consist."  A  public  sys- 
tem of  education  enabled  the  Utopians  to  avail  themselves 
of  their  leisure.  While  in  England  half  of  the  population 
could  read  no  English,  every  child  was  well  taught  in 
"Nowhere."  The  physical  aspects  of  society  were  cared 
for  as  attentively  as  its  moral.  The  houses  of  Utopia  "  in 
the  beginning  were  very  low  and  like  homely  cottages  or 
poor  shepherd  huts  made  at  all  adventures  of  every  rude 
piece  of  timber  that  came  first  to  hand,  with  mud  walls 
and  ridged  roofs  thatched  over  with  straw."  The  picture 
was  really  that  of  the  common  English  town  of  More's 
day,  the  home  of  squalor  and  pestilence.  In  Utopia  how- 
ever they  had  at  last  come  to  realize  the  connection  between 
public  morality  and  the  health  which  springs  from  light, 
air,  comfort,  and  cleanliness.  "  The  streets  were  twenty 
feet  broad ;  the  houses  backed  by  spacious  gardens,  and, 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  107 

curiously  builded  after  a  gorgeous  and  gallant  sort,  with 
their  stories  one  after  another.  The  outsides  of  the  walls 
be  made  either  of  hard  flint,  or  of  plaster,  or  else  of  brick; 
and  the  inner  sides  be  well  strengthened  by  timber  work. 
The  roofs  be  plain  and  flat,  covered  over  with  plaster,  so 
tempered  that  no  fire  can  hurt  or  perish  it,  and  withstand- 
ing the  violence  of  the  weather  better  than  lead.  They 
keep  the  wind  out  of  their  windows  with  glass,  for  it  is 
there  much  used,  and  sometimes  also  with  fine  linen  cloth 
dipped  in  oil  or  amber,  and  that  for  two  commodities,  for 
by  this  means  more  light  cometh  in  and  the  wind  is  bet- 
ter kept  out." 

The  same  foresight  which  appears  in  More's  treatment 
of  the  questions  of  Labor  and  the  Public  Health  is  yet 
more  apparent  in  his  treatment  of  the  question  of  Crime. 
He  was  the  first  to  suggest  that  punishment  was  less  effect- 
ive in  suppressing  it  than  prevention.  "  If  you  allow  your 
people  to  be  badly  taught,  their  morals  to  be  corrupted 
from  childhood,  and  then  when  they  are  men  punish  them 
for  the  very  crimes  to  which  they  have  been  trained  in  child- 
hood— what  is  this  but  to  make  thieves,  and  then  to  pun- 
ish them?"  He  was  the  first  to  plead  for  proportion  be- 
tween the  punishment  and  the  crime,  and  to  point  out  the 
folly  of  the  cruel  penalties  of  his  day.  "  Simple  theft  is 
not  so  great  an  offence  as  to  be  punished  with  death."  If 
a  thief  and  a  murderer  are  sure  of  the  same  penalty,  More 
shows  that  the  law  is  simply  tempting  the  thief  to  secure 
his  theft  by  murder.  "  While  we  go  about  to  make  thieves 
afraid,  we  are  really  provoking  them  to  kill  good  men." 
The  end  of  all  punishment  he  declares  to  be  reformation, 
"  nothing  else  but  the  destruction  of  vice  and  the  saving 
of  men."  He  advises  "so  using  and  ordering  criminals 
that  they  cannot  choose  but  be  good ;  and  what  harm  so- 
ever they  did  before,  the  residue  of  their  lives  to  make 
amends  for  the  same."  Above  all  he  urges  that  to  be  re- 
medial punishment  must  be  wrought  out  by  labor  and  hope, 
so  that  "  none  is  hopeless  or  in  despair  to  recover  again  his 


108  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

former  state  of  freedom  by  giving  good  tokens  and  likeli- 
hood of  himself  that  he  will  ever  after  that  live  a  true  and 
honest  man."  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  in  the  great 
principles  More  lays  down  he  anticipated  every  one  of  the 
improvements  in  our  criminal  system  which  have  distin- 
guished the  last  hundred  years. 

His  treatment  of  the  religious  question  was  even  more 
in  advance  of  his  age.  If  the  houses  of  Utopia  were 
strangely  in  contrast  with  the  halls  of  England,  where  the 
bones  from  every  dinner  lay  rotting  in  the  dirty  straw 
which  strewed  the  floor,  where  the  smoke  curled  about  the 
rafters,  and  the  wind  whistled  through  the  unglazed  win- 
dows ;  if  its  penal  legislation  had  little  likeness  to  the  gal- 
lows which  stood  out  so  frequently  against  our  English 
sky ;  the  religion  of  "  Nowhere"  was  in  yet  stronger  con- 
flict with  the  faith  of  Christendom.  It  rested  simply  on 
nature  and  reason.  It  held  that  God's  design  was  the  hap- 
piness of  man,  and  that  the  ascetic  rejection  of  human  de- 
lights, save  for  the  common  good,  was  thanklessness  to 
the  Giver.  Christianity  indeed  had  already  reached  Uto- 
pia, but  it  had  few  priests ;  religion  found  its  centre  rather 
in  the  family  than  in  the  congregation :  and  each  house- 
hold confessed  its  faults  to  its  own  natural  head.  A  yet 
stranger  characteristic  was  seen  in  the  peaceable  way  in 
which  it  lived  side  by  side  with  the  older  religions.  More 
than  a  century  before  William  of  Orange  More  discerned 
and  proclaimed  the  great  principle  of  religious  toleration. 
In  "  Nowhere"  it  was  lawful  to  every  man  to  be  of  what 
religion  he  would.  Even  the  disbelievers  in  a  Divine  Be- 
ing or  in  the  immortality  of  man,  who  by  a  single  excep- 
tion to  its  perfect  religious  indifference  were  excluded  from 
public  office,  were  excluded,  not  on  the  ground  of  their  re- 
ligious belief,  but  because  their  opinions  were  deemed  to 
be  degrading  to  mankind  and  therefore  to  incapacitate 
those  who  held  them  from  governing  in  a  noble  temper. 
But  they  were  subject  to  no  punishment,  because  the  people 
of  Utopia  were  "  persuaded  that  it  is  not  in  a  man's  power 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  109 

to  believe  what  he  list."  The  religion  which  a  man  held 
he  might  propagate  by  argument,  though  not  by  violence 
or  insult  to  the  religion  of  others.  But  while  each  sect 
performed  its  rites  in  private,  all  assembled  for  public 
worship  in  a  spacious  temple,  where  the  vast  throng,  clad 
in  white,  and  grouped  round  a  priest  clothed  in  fair  rai- 
ment wrought  marvellously  out  of  bird's  plumage,  joined 
in  hymns  and  prayers  so  framed  as  to  be  acceptable  to  all. 
The  importance  of  this  public  devotion  lay  in  the  evidence 
it  afforded  that  liberty  of  conscience  could  be  combined 
with  religious  unity. 

But  even  more  important  than  More's  defence  of  relig- 
ious freedom  was  his  firm  maintenance  of  political  liberty 
against  the  monarchy.  Steady  and  irresistible  as  was  the 
growth  of  the  royal  power,  it  was  far  from  seeming  to 
the  keenest  political  thinker  of  that  day  so  natural  and 
inevitable  a  development  of  our  history  as  it  seems  to 
some  writers  in  our  own.  In  political  hints  which  lie 
scattered  over  the  whole  of  the  Utopia  More  notes  with  a 
bitter  irony  the  advance  of  the  new  despotism.  It  was 
only  in  "  Nowhere"  that  a  sovereign  was  "  removeable  on 
suspicion  of  a  design  to  enslave  his  people."  In  Eng- 
land the  work  of  slavery  was  being  quietly  wrought, 
hints  the  great  lawyer,  through  the  law.  "  There  will 
never  be  wanting  some  pretence  for  deciding  in  the  king's 
favor ;  as  that  equity  is  on  his  side,  or  the  strict  letter  of 
the  law,  or  some  forced  interpretation  of  it :  or  if  none  of 
these,  that  the  royal  prerogative  ought  with  conscientious 
judges  to  outweigh  all  other  considerations."  We  are 
startled  at  the  precision  with  which  More  describes  the 
processes  by  which  the  law  courts  were  to  lend  themselves 
to  the  advance  of  tyranny  till  their  crowning  judgment 
in  the  case  of  ship-money.  But  behind  these  judicial  ex- 
pedients lay  great  principles  of  absolutism,  which  partly 
from  the  example  of  foreign  monarchies,  partly  from 
the  sense  of  social  and  political  insecurity,  and  yet  more 
from  the  isolated  position  o*  the  Crown,  were  gradually 


110  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

winning  their  way  in  public  opinion.  "These  notions* 
— More  goes  boldly  on  in  words  written,  it  must  be  re- 
membered, within  the  precincts  of  Henry's  court  and  be- 
neath the  eye  of  Wolsey — "  these  notions  are  fostered  by 
the  maxim  that  the  king  can  do  no  wrong,  however  much 
he  may  wish  to  do  it ;  that  not  only  the  property  but  the 
persons  of  his  subjects  are  his  own ;  and  that  a  man  has  a 
right  to  no  more  than  the  king's  goodness  thinks  fit  not  to 
take  from  him."  It  is  only  in  the  light  of  this  emphatic 
protest  against  the  king-worship  which  was  soon  to  over- 
ride liberty  and  law  that  we  can  understand  More's  later 
career.  Steady  to  the  last  in  his  loyalty  to  Parliaments, 
as  steady  in  his  resistance  to  mere  personal  rule,  it  was 
with  a  smile  as  fearless  as  the  smile  with  which  he  penned 
the  half -jesting  words  of  his  Utopia  that  he  sealed  them 
with  his  blood  on  Tower  HilL 


CHAPTER  III. 

WOLSEY. 
1514^1529. 

"  THERE  are  many  things  in  the  Commonwealth  of  No- 
where that  I  rather  wish  than  hope  to  see  embodied  in  our 
own."  It  was  with  these  words  of  characteristic  irony 
that  More  closed  the  first  work  which  embodied  the  dreams 
of  the  New  Learning.  Destined  as  they  were  to  fulfilment 
in  the  course  of  ages,  its  schemes  of  social,  religious,  and 
political  reform  broke  in  fact  helplessly  against  the  tem- 
per of  the  time.  At  the  moment  when  More  was  pleading 
the  cause  of  justice  between  rich  and  poor  social  discontent 
was  being  fanned  by  new  exactions  and  sterner  laws  into 
a  fiercer  flame.  While  he  was  advocating  toleration  and 
Christian  comprehension  Christendom  stood  on  the  verge 
of  a  religious  strife  which  was  to  rend  it  forever  in  pieces. 
While  he  aimed  sarcasm  after  sarcasm  at  king-worship 
the  new  despotism  of  the  Monarchy  was  being  organized 
into  a  vast  and  all-embracing  system  by  the  genius  of 
Thomas  Wolsey.  Wolsey  was  the  son  of  a  wealthy  towns- 
man of  Ipswich  whose  ability  had  raised  him  into  notice 
at  the  close  of  the  preceding  reign,  and  who  had  been  taken 
by  Bishop  Fox  into  the  service  of  the  Crown.  The  activ- 
ity which  he  showed  in  organizing  and  equipping  the  royal 
army  for  the  campaign  of  1513  won  for  him  a  foremost 
place  in  the  confidence  of  Henry  the  Eighth.  The  young 
King  lavished  dignities  on  him  with  a  profusion  that 
marked  the  completeness  of  his  trust.  From  the  post  of 
royal  almoner  he  was  advanced  in  1513  to  the  see  of  Tour- 
nay.  At  the  opening  of  1514  he  became  bishop  of  Lincoln ; 
at  its  close  he  was  translated  to  the  archbishopric  of 


112  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

York.  In  1515  Henry  procured  from  Rome  his  elevation 
to  the  office  of  cardinal  and  raised  him  to  the  post  of  chan- 
cellor. So  quick  a  rise  stirred  envy  in  the  men  about  him ; 
and  his  rivals  noted  bitterly  the  songs,  the  dances,  and 
carousals  which  had  won,  as  they  believed,  the  favor  of 
the  king.  But  sensuous  and  worldly  as  was  Wolsey's 
temper,  his  powers  lifted  him  high  above  the  level  of  a 
court  favorite.  His  noble  bearing,  his  varied  ability,  his 
enormous  capacity  for  toil,  the  natural  breadth  and  grand- 
eur of  his  mind,  marked  him  naturally  out  as  the  minister 
of  a  king  who  showed  throughout  his  reign  a  keen  eye  for 
greatness  in  the  men  about  him. 

Wolsey's  mind  was  European  rather  than  English;  it 
dwelt  little  on  home  affairs  but  turned  almost  exclusively 
to  the  general  politics  of  the  European  powers  and  of  Eng- 
land as  one  of  them.  Whatever  might  be  Henry's  disap- 
pointment in  the  issue  of  his  French  campaigns  the  young 
King  might  dwell  with  justifiable  pride  on  the  general  re- 
sult of  his  foreign  policy.  If  his  direct  gains  from  the 
Holy  League  had  been  little,  he  had  at  any  rate  won  se- 
curity on  the  side  of  France.  The  loss  of  Navarre  and  of 
the  Milanese  left  Lewis  a  far  less  dangerous  neighbor  than 
he  had  seemed  at  Henry's  accession,  while  the  appearance 
of  the  Swiss  soldiery  during  the  war  of  the  League  de- 
stroyed the  military  supremacy  which  France  had  enjoyed 
from  the  days  of  Charles  the  Eighth.  But  if  the  war  had 
freed  England  from  the  fear  of  French  pressure  Wolsey 
was  as  resolute  to  free  her  from  the  dictation  of  Ferdinand, 
and  this  the  resentment  of  Henry  at  his  unscrupulous  de- 
sertion enabled  him  to  bring  about.  Crippled  as  she  was, 
France  was  no  longer  formidable  as  a  foe;  and  her  alli- 
ance would  not  only  break  the  supremacy  of  Ferdinand 
over  English  policy  but  secure  Henry  on  his  northern  bor- 
der. Her  husband's  death  at  Flodden  and  the  infancy  of 
their  son  raised  Margaret  Tudor  to  the  Scotch  regency, 
and  seemed  to  promise  Henry  a  hold  on  his  troublesome 
neighbors.  But  her  marriage  a  year  later  with  the  Earl 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461—1540.  113 

of  Angus,  Archibald  Douglas,  soon  left  the  Regent  power- 
less among  the  factions  of  warring  nobles.  She  appealed 
to  her  brother  for  aid,  while  her  opponents  called  on  the 
Duke  of  Albany,  the  son  of  the  Albany  who  had  been 
driven  to  France  in  1484  and  heir  to  the  crown  after  the  in- 
fant king  to  return  and  take  the  regency.  Albany  held 
broad  lands  in  France ;  he  had  won  fame  as  a  French  gen- 
eral ;  and  Scotland  in  his  hands  would  be  simply  a  means 
of  French  attack.  A  French  alliance  not  only  freed  Henry 
from  dependence  on  Ferdinand  but  would  meet  this  dan- 
ger from  the  north;  and  in  the  summer  of  1514  a  treaty 
was  concluded  with  the  French  King  and  ratified  by  his 
marriage  with  Henry's  youngest  sister,  Mary  Tudor. 

The  treaty  was  hardly  signed  when  the  death  of  Lewis 
in  January  1515  undid  this  marriage  and  placed  his  young 
cousin,  Francis  the  First,  upon  the  throne.  But  the  old 
king's  death  brought  no  change  of  policy.  Francis  at  once 
prepared  to  renew  the  war  in  Italy,  and  for  this  purpose 
he  needed  the  friendship  of  his  two  neighbors  in  the  west 
and  the  north,  Henry  and  the  ruler  of  the  Netherlands, 
the  young  Charles  of  Austria.  Both  were  willing  to  give 
their  friendship.  Charles,  jealous  of  Maximilian's  desire 
to  bring  him  into  tutelage,  looked  to  a  French  alliance  as 
a  security  against  the  pressure  of  the  Emperor,  while 
Henry  and  Wolsey  were  eager  to  dispatch  Francis  on  a 
campaign  across  the  Alps,  which  would  at  any  rate  while 
it  lasted  remove  all  fear  of  an  attack  on  England.  A  yet 
stronger  ground  in  the  minds  of  both  Charles  and  Henry 
for  facilitating  the  French  King's  march  was  their  secret 
belief  that  his  invasion  of  the  Milanese  would  bring  the 
young  king  to  inevitable  ruin,  for  the  Emperor  and  Fer- 
dinand of  Aragon  were  leagued  with  every  Italian  state 
against  Francis,  and  a  Swiss  army  prepared  to  dispute 
with  him  the  possession  of  the  Milanese.  Charles  there- 
fore betrothed  himself  to  the  French  King's  sister,  and 
Henry  concluded  a  fresh  treaty  with  him  in  the  spring  of 
1515.  But  the  dreams  of  both  rulers  were  roughly  broken. 


114  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

Francis  succeeded  both  in  crossing  the  Alps  and  in  beat- 
ing the  Swiss  army.  His  victory  in  the  greatest  battle  of 
the  age,  the  battle  of  Marignano,  at  once  gave  him  the 
Milanese  and  laid  the  rest  of  Italy  at  his  feet.  The  work 
of  the  Holy  Alliance  was  undone,  and  the  dominion  which 
England  had  dreaded  in  the  hands  of  Lewis  the  Twelfth 
was  restored  in  the  younger  and  more  vigorous  hands  of 
his  successor.  Neither  the  King  nor  the  Cardinal  could 
hide  their  chagrin  when  the  French  minister  announced 
his  master's  victory,  but  it  was  no  time  for  an  open  breach. 
Ah1  Wolsey  could  do  was  to  set  himself  secretly  to  hamper 
the  French  King's  work.  English  gold  hindered  any  re- 
conciliation between  France  and  the  Swiss,  and  enabled 
Maximilian  to  lead  a  joint  army  of  Swiss  and  Imperial 
soldiers  in  the  following  year  over  the  Alps. 

But -the  campaign  broke  down.  At  this  juncture  indeed 
the  death  of  Ferdinand  in  January  1516  changed  the  whole 
aspect  of  European  politics.  It  at  once  opened  to  Charles  of 
Austria  his  Spanish  and  Neapolitan  heritage.  The  pres- 
ence of  the  young  King  was  urgently  called  for  by  the  trou- 
bles that  followed  in  Castile,  and  Charles  saw  that  peace  was 
needed  for  the  gathering  into  his  hands  of  realms  so  widely 
scattered  as  his  own.  Maximilian  too  was  ready  to  set 
aside  all  other  aims  to  secure  the  aggrandizement  of  his 
house.  After  an  inactive  campaign  therefore  the  Emperor 
negotiated  secretly  with  France,  and  the  treaty  of  Noyon 
which  Charles  concluded  with  Francis  in  August  1516 
was  completed  in  March  1517  by  the  accession  of  Maxi- 
milian to  their  alliance  in  the  Treaty  of  Cambray.  To  all 
outer  seeming  the  Treaty  of  Cambray  left  Francis  supreme 
in  the  west,  unequalled  in  military  repute,  a  soldier  who 
at  twenty  had  withstood  and  broken  the  league  of  all 
Europe  in  arms,  master  of  the  Milanese,  and  through  his 
alliances  with  Venice,  Florence,  and  the  Pope  virtually 
master  of  all  Italy  save  the  Neapolitan  realm.  On  the 
other  hand  the  treaty  left  England  exposed  and  alone, 
should  France  choose  this  moment  for  attack.  Francis 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  115 

was  well  aware  of  Wolsey's  efforts  against  him,  and  the 
state  of  Scotland  offered  the  ready  means  of  bringing  about 
a  quarrel.  While  Henry,  anxious  as  he  was  to  aid  his 
sister,  was  fettered  by  the  fear  that  English  intervention 
would  bring  French  intervention  in  its  train  and  endanger 
the  newly  concluded  alliance,  Albany  succeeded  in  evad- 
ing the  English  cruisers  and  landing  in  the  May  of  1515. 
He  was  at  once  declared  Protector  of  the  realm  by  the 
Parliament  at  Edinburgh.  Margaret  on  the  other  hand 
was  driven  into  Stirling,  and  after  a  short  siege  forced  to 
take  refuge  in  England.  The  influence  of  Albany  and  the 
French  party  whom  he  headed  secured  for  Francis  in  any 
struggle  the  aid  of  Scotland.  But  neither  Henry  nor  his 
minister  really  dreaded  danger  from  the  Treaty  of  Cam- 
bray;  on  the  contrary  it  solved  all  their  difficulties.  So 
well  did  they  understand  the  aim  of  Charles  in  concluding 
it  that  they  gave  him  the  gold  which  enabled  him  to  reach 
Spain.  Master  of  Castile  and  Aragon,  of  Naples  and  the 
Netherlands,  the  Spanish  King  rose  into  a  check  on  the 
French  monarchy  such  as  the  policy  of  Henry  or  Wolsey 
had  never  been  able  to  construct  before.  Instead  of  tow- 
ering over  Europe,  Francis  found  himself  confronted  in 
the  hour  of  his  pride  by  a  rival  whom  he  was  never  to 
overcome;  while  England,  deserted  and  isolated  as  she 
seemed  for  the  moment,  was  eagerly  sought  in  alliance  by 
both  princes.  In  October  1518  Francis  strove  to  bind  her 
to  his  cause  by  a  new  treaty  of  peace,  in  which  England 
sold  Tournay  to  France  and  the  hand  of  the  French  dau- 
phin was  promised  to  Henry's  daughter  Mary,  now  a  child 
of  two  years  old. 

At  the  close  of  1518  therefore  the  policy  of  Wolsey 
seemed  justified  by  success.  He  had  found  England  a 
power  of  the  second  order,  overawed  by  France  and  dictated 
to  by  Ferdinand  of  Spain.  She  now  stood  in  the  forefront 
of  European  affairs,  a  state  whose  alliance  was  desired 
alike  by  French  King  and  Spanish  King,  and  which  dealt 
on  equal  terms  with  Pope  or  fimperor.  In  European  cabi- 


116  BISTORT?  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

nets  Wolsey  was  regarded  as  hardly  less  a  power  to  be 
conciliated  than  his  royal  master.  Both  Charles  and  Fran- 
cis sought  his  friendship ;  and  in  the  years  which  followed 
his  official  emoluments  were  swelled  by  pensions  from  both 
princes.  At  home  the  King  loaded  him  with  new  proofs 
of  favor.  The  revenues  of  two  sees  whose  tenants  were 
foreigners  fell  into  his  hands;  he  held  the  bishopric  of 
Winchester  and  the  abbacy  of  St.  Albans.  He  spent  this 
vast  wealth  with  princely  ostentation.  His  pomp  was  al- 
most royal.  A  train  of  prelates  and  nobles  followed  him 
as  he  moved ;  his  household  was  composed  of  five  hundred 
persons  of  noble  birth,  and  its  chief  posts  were  occupied 
by  knights  and  barons  of  the  realm.  Two  of  the  houses 
he  built,  Hampton  Court  and  York  House,  the  later  White- 
hall, were  splendid  enough  to  serve  at  his  fall  as  royal  pal- 
aces. Nor  was  this  magnificence  a  mere  show  of  power. 
The  whole  direction  of  home  and  foreign  affairs  rested  with 
Wolsey  alone.  His  toil  was  ceaseless.  The  morning  was 
for  the  most  part  given  to  his  business  as  chancellor  in 
Westminster  Hall  and  at  the  Star-Chamber;  but  nightfall 
still  found  him  laboring  at  exchequer  business  or  home 
administration,  managing  Church  affairs,  unravelling  the 
complexities  of  Irish  misgovernment,  planning  schools  and 
colleges,  above  all  drawing  and  studying  dispatches  and 
transacting  the  whole  diplomatic  correspondence  of  the 
state.  Greedy  as  was  his  passion  for  toil,  Wolsey  felt  the 
pressure  of  this  enormous  mass  of  business,  and  his  impe- 
rious tones,  his  angry  outbursts  of  impatience  showed  him 
to  be  overworked.  Even  his  vigorous  frame  gave  way. 
Still  a  strong  and  handsome  man  in  1518  at  the  age  of  forty- 
seven,  Wolsey  was  already  an  old  man,  broken  by  disease, 
when  he  fell  from  power  at  fifty-five.  But  enormous  as 
was  the  mass  of  work  which  he  undertook,  it  was  thor- 
oughly done.  His  administration  of  the  royal  treasury 
was  rigidly  economical.  The  number  of  his  dispatches 
is  hardly  less  remarkable  than  the  care  he  bestowed  on 
each.  Even  More,  an  avowed  enemy,  owns  that  as  Chan- 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  117 

cellor  lie  surpassed  all  men's  expectations.  The  court  of 
Chancery  indeed  became  so  crowded  through  the  character 
for  expedition  and  justice  which  it  gained  under  his  rule 
that  subordinate  courts  had  to  be  created  for  its  relief. 

But  not  even  with  this  concentration  of  authority  in  a 
single  hand  was  Henry  content.  At  the  close  of  1517  he 
procured  from  the  Pope  the  Cardinal's  appointment  as 
Legate  a  later e  in  the  realm.  Such  a  Legate  was  entrusted 
with  powers  almost  as  full  as  those  of  the  Pope  himself; 
his  jurisdiction  extended  over  every  bishop  and  priest,  it 
overrode  every  privilege  or  exemption  of  abbey  or  celL 
while  his  court  superseded  that  of  Rome  as  the  final  court 
of  ecclesiastical  appeal  for  the  realm.  Already  wielding 
the  full  powers  of  secular  justice  in  his  capacity  of  Chan- 
cellor and  of  president  of  the  royal  Council,  Wolsey  wielded 
the  full  power  of  spiritual  justice  in  his  capacity  of  Legate. 
His  elevation  was  no  mere  freak  of  royal  favor ;  it  was  the 
result  of  a  distinct  policy.  The  moment  had  come  when 
the  Monarchy  was  to  gather  up  all  government  into  the 
personal  grasp  of  the  King.  The  checks  which  had  been 
imposed  on  the  action  of  the  sovereign  by  the  presence  of 
great  prelate'  and  lords  at  his  council  were  practically  re- 
moved. His  fellow  councillors  learned  to  hold  their  peace 
when  the  haughty  minister  "  clapped  his  rod  on  the  board." 
The  restraints  of  public  justice  were  equally  done  away. 
Even  the  distant  check  of  Rome  was  gone.  All  secular 
all  ecclesiastical  power  was  summed  up  in  a  single  hand. 
It  was  this  concentration  of  authority  in  Wolsey  which 
accustomed  England  to  a  system  of  personal  government 
under  Henry  and  his  successors.  It  was  the  Cardinal's 
long  tenure  of  the  whole  Papal  authority  within  the  realm, 
and  the  consequent  suspension  of  appeals  to  Rome,  that 
led  men  to  acquiesce  at  a  later  time  in  Henry's  own  claim 
of  religious  supremacy.  For  proud  as  was  Wolsey 's  bear- 
ing and  high  as  were  his  natural  powers  he  stood  before 
England  as  the  mere  creature  of  the  King.  Greatness, 
wealth,  authority  he  held,  and  owned  he  held,  simply  at 


118  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

the  royal  will.  In  raising  his  low-born  favorite  to  the 
head  of  church  and  state  Henry  was  gathering  all  religious 
as  well  as  all  civil  authority  into  his  personal  grasp.  The 
nation  which  trembled  before  Wolsey  learned  to  tremble 
before  the  master  who  could  destroy  Wolsey  with  a  breath. 
The  rise  of  Charles  of  Austria  gave  a  new  turn  to  Wol- 
sey's  policy.  Till  now  France  had  been  a  pressing  danger, 
and  the  political  scheme  both  of  Henry  and  his  minister 
lay  in  organizing  leagues  to  check  her  greatness  or  in  di- 
verting her  activity  to  the  fields  of  Lombardy.  But  from 
the  moment  of  Ferdinand's  death  this  power  of  Francis 
was  balanced  by  the  power  of  Charles.  Possessor  of  the 
Netherlands,  of  Franche  Comte,  of  Spain,  Charles  already 
pressed  France  on  its  northern,  eastern,  and  southern  bor- 
ders when  the  death  of  his  grandfather  Maximilian  in  the 
spring  of  1519  added  to  his  dominions  the  heritage  of  the 
House  of  Austria  in  Swabia  and  on  the  Danube.  It  did 
yet  more  for  him  in  opening  to  him  the  Empire.  The  in- 
trigues of  Maximilian  had  secured  for  Charles  promises  of 
support  from  a  majority  of  the  Electors,  and  though  Fran- 
cis redoubled  his  efforts  and  Henry  the  Eighth  sent  an 
envoy  to  push  his  own  succession  the  cry  of  Germany  for 
a  German  head  carried  all  before  it.  In  June  1519  Charles 
was  elected  Emperor ;  and  France  saw  herself  girt  in  on 
every  side  by  a  power  whose  greed  was  even  greater  than 
her  own.  For,  boy  of  nineteen  as  he  was,  Charles  from 
the  first  moment  of  his  rule  meant  to  make  himself  master 
of  the  world ;  and  France,  thrown  suddenly  on  the  defen- 
sive, nerved  herself  for  the  coming  struggle.  Both  needed 
the  gold  and  friendship  of  England.  Convinced  as  he 
was  of  Henry's  treachery  in  the  Imperial  election,  where 
the  English  sovereign  had  promised  Francis  his  support, 
the  French  King  clung  to  the  alliance  which  Wolsey  in 
his  uncertainty  as  to  the  actual  drift  of  Charles  had  con- 
cluded in  1518,  and  pressed  for  an  interview  with  Henry 
himself.  But  the  need  of  France  had  woke  dreams  of 
more  than  mere  safety  or  a  balanced  neutrality  in  Wolsey 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  119 

and  his  master.  The  time  seemed  come  at  last  for  a  bolder 
game.  The  claim  on  the  French  crown  had  never  been 
waived ;  the  dream  of  recovering  at  least  Guienne  and  Nor- 
mandy still  lived  on  in  the  hearts  of  English  statesmen; 
and  the  subtle,  unscrupulous  youth  who  was  now  planning 
his  blow  for  the  mastery  of  the  world  knew  well  how  to 
seize  upon  dreams  such  as  these.  Nor  was  Wolsey  for- 
gotten. If  Henry  coveted  France,  his  minister  coveted 
no  less  a  prize  than  the  Papacy ;  and  the  young  Emperor 
was  lavish  of  promises  of  support  in  any  coming  election. 
The  result  of  his  seductions  was  quickly  seen.  While 
Henry  deferred  the  interview  with  Francis  till  the  sum- 
mer of  1520,  Charles  had  already  planned  a  meeting  with 
his  uncle  in  the  opening  of  the  year. 

What  importance  Charles  attached  to  this  meeting  was 
seen  in  his  leaving  Spain  ablaze  with  revolt  behind  him 
to  keep  his  engagement.  He  landed  at  Dover  in  the  end 
of  May,  and  King  and  Emperor  rode  along  to  Canterbury, 
but  of  the  promises  or  pledges  which  passed  we  know  lit- 
tle save  from  the  after-course  of  English  politics.  Noth- 
ing could  have  differed  more  vividly  from  this  simple  ride 
than  the  interview  with  Francis  which  followed  in  June. 
A  camp  of  three  hundred  white  tents  surrounded  a  faery 
palace  with  gilded  posterns  and  brightly  colored  oriels 
which  rose  like  a  dream  from  the  barren  plain  of  Guisnes, 
its  walls  hung  with  tapestry,  its  roof  embossed  with  roses, 
its  golden  fountain  spouting  wine  over  the  greensward. 
But  all  this  pomp  and  splendor,  the  chivalrous  embraces 
and  tourneys  of  the  Kings,  the  gorgeous  entry  of  Wojsey 
in  his  crimson  robe  on  a  mule  trapped  with  gold,  the  fresh 
treaty  which  ratified  the  alliance,  hardly  veiled  the  new 
English  purpose.  A  second  interview  between  Charles 
and  his  uncle  as  he  returned  from  the  meeting  with  Fran- 
cis ended  in  a  secret  confederacy  of  the  two  sovereigns  and 
the  promise  of  the  Emperor  to  marry  his  cousin,  Henry's 
one  child,  Mary  Tudor.  With  her  hand  passed  the  heri- 
tage of  the  English  Crown.  Henry  had  now  ceased  to  hope 
6  YOL.  2 


120          HISTOBY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.         [BOOK  V. 

for  a  son  from  Catharine,  and  Mary  was  his  destined  suc- 
cessor. Her  right  to  the  throne  was  asserted  by  a  deed 
which  proved  how  utterly  the  baronage  now  lay  at  the 
mercy  of  the  King.  The  Duke  of  Buckingham  stood  first 
in  blood  as  in  power  among  the  English  nobles;  he  was 
the  descendant  of  Edward  the  Third's  youngest  son,  and 
if  Mary's  succession  were  denied  he  stood  heir  to  the  throne. 
His  hopes  had  been  fanned  by  prophets  and  astrologers, 
and  wild  words  told  his  purpose  to  seize  the  Crown  on 
Henry's  death  in  defiance  of  every  opponent.  But  word 
and  act  had  for  two  years  been  watched  by  the  King ;  and 
in  1521  the  Duke  was  arrested,  condemned  as  a  traitor  by 
his  peers,  and  beheaded  on  Tower  Hill.  His  blood  was  a 
pledge  of  Henry's  sincerity  which  Charles  could  not  mis- 
take. Francis  on  the  other  hand  had  never  for  a  moment 
been  deceived  by  the  profuse  assurances  of  friendship 
which  the  King  and  Wolsey  lavished  on  him.  A  revolt 
of  the  Spanish  towns  offered  a  favorable  opportunity  for 
an  attack  on  his  rival,  and  a  French  army  passed  over  the 
Pyrenees  into  Navarre  while  Francis  himself  prepared  to 
invade  the  Netherlands.  Both  princes  appealed  for  aid 
under  their  separate  treaties  to  Henry ;  and  the  English 
sovereign,  whom  the  quick  stroke  of  the  French  had  taken 
by  surprise,  could  only  gain  time  by  a  feigned  mediation 
in  which  Wolsey  visited  both  Emperor  and  King.  But 
at  the  close  of  the  year  England  was  at  last  ready  for  ac- 
tion, and  Wolsey's  solemn  decision  that  Francis  was  the 
aggressor  was  followed  in  November  by  a  secret  league 
which  was  concluded  at  Calais  between  the  Pope,  the  Em- 
peror, and  Henry. 

The  conquest  of  the  Milanese  by  the  imperial  generals 
turned  at  this  moment  the  balance  of  the  war,  and  as  the 
struggle  went  on  the  accession  of  Venice  and  the  lesser 
Italian  republics,  of  the  King  of  Hungary  and  Ferdinand 
of  Austria,  to  whom  Charles  had  ceded  his  share  in  the 
hereditary  duchy  of  their  house,  to  the  alliance  for  the  re- 
covery of  Italy  from  the  French,  threatened  ruin  to  the 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  121 

cause  of  Francis.  In  real  power  however  the  two  com- 
batants were  still  fairly  matched.  If  she  stood  alone, 
France  was  rich  and  compact,  while  her  opponents  were 
scattered,  distracted  by  warring  aims,  and  all  equally  poor. 
The  wealth  which  had  given  Henry  his  weight  in  the 
counsels  of  Europe  at  the  opening  of  his  reign  had  been 
exhausted  by  his  earlier  wars,  and  Wolsey's  economy  had 
done  nothing  more  than  tide  the  crown  through  the  past 
years  of  peace.  But  now  that  Henry  had  promised  to  raise 
forty  thousand  men  for  the  coming  campaign  the  ordinary 
resources  of  the  treasury  were  utterly  insufficient.  With 
the  instinct  of  despotism  Wolsey  shrank  from  reviving 
the  tradition  of  the  Parliament.  Though  Henry  had  thrice 
called  the  Houses  together  to  supply  the  expenses  of  his 
earlier  struggle  with  France  his  minister  had  governed 
through  seven  years  of  peace  without  once  assembling 
them.  War  made  a  Parliament  inevitable,  but  for  a  while 
Wolsey  strove  to  delay  its  summons  by  a  wide  extension 
of  the  practice  which  Edward  the  Fourth  had  invented  of 
raising  money  by  forced  loans  or  "Benevolences,"  to  be 
repaid  from  the  first  subsidy  of  a  coming  Parliament. 
Large  sums  were  assessed  upon  every  county.  Twenty 
thousand  pounds  were  exacted  from  London,  and  its  wealth- 
ier citizens  were  summoned  before  the  Cardinal  and  re- 
quired to  give  an  account  of  the  value  of  their  estates. 
Commissioners  were  sent  into  each  shire  for  the  purposes 
of  assessment,  and  precepts  were  issued  on  their  informa- 
tion, requiring  in  some  cases  supplies  of  soldiers,  in  others 
a  tenth  of  a  man's  income,  for  the  King's  service.  So 
poor  however  was  the  return  that  the  Earl  of  Surrey,  who 
was  sent  as  general  to  Calais,  could  muster  only  a  force  of 
seventeen  thousand  men ;  and  while  Charles  succeeded  in 
driving  the  French  from  Milan,  the  English  campaign 
dwindled  into  a  mere  raid  upon  Picardy,  from  which  the 
army  fell  back,  broken  with  want  and  disease. 

The  Cardinal  was  driven  to  call  the  Estates  together  in 
April  1523 ;  and  the  conduct  of  the  Commons  showed  how 


122  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [Booz  V. 

little  the  new  policy  of  the  Monarchy  had  as  yet  done  to 
change  the  temper  of  the  nation  or  to  break  its  loyalty  to 
the  tradition  of  constitutional  freedom.  Wolsey  needed 
the  sum  of  eight  hundred  thousand  pounds,  and  proposed 
to  raise  it  by  a  property  tax  of  twenty  per  cent.  Such  a 
demand  was  unprecedented,  but  the  Cardinal  counted  on 
his  presence  to  bear  down  all  opposition,  and  made  the  de- 
mand in  person.  He  was  received  with  obstinate  silence. 
It  was  in  vain  that  he  called  on  member  after  member  to 
answer;  and  his  appeal  to  More,  who  had  been  elected  to 
fill  the  chair  of  the  House  of  Commons,  was  met  by  the 
Speaker's  falling  on  his  knees  and  representing  his  power- 
lessness  to  reply  till  he  had  received  instructions  from  the 
House  itself.  The  effort  to  overawe  the  Commons  had  in 
fact  failed,  and  Wolsey  was  forced  to  retire.  He  had  no 
sooner  withdrawn  than  aai  angry  debate  began,  and  the 
Cardinal  returned  to  answer  the  objections  which  were 
raised  to  the  subsidy.  But  the  Commons  again  foiled  the 
minister's  attempt  to  influence  their  deliberations  by  refus- 
ing to  discuss  the  matter  in  his  presence.  The  struggle 
continued  for  a  fortnight ;  and  though  successful  in  pro- 
curing a  grant  the  court  party  were  forced  to  content  them- 
selves with  less  than  half  of  Wolsey 's  original  demand. 
The  Church  displayed  as  independent  a  spirit.  Wolsey's 
aim  of  breaking  down  constitutional  traditions  was  shown, 
as  in  the  case  of  the  Commons,  by  his  setting  aside  the  old 
assembly  of  the  provincial  convocations,  and  as  Legate 
summoning  the  clergy  to  meet  in  a  national  synod.  But 
the  clergy  held  as  stubbornly  to  constitutional  usage  as  the 
laity,  and  the  Cardinal  was  forced  to  lay  his  demand  be- 
fore them  in  their  separate  convocations.  Even  here  how- 
ever the  enormous  grant  he  asked  was  disputed  for  four 
months,  and  the  matter  had  at  last  to  be  settled  by  a  com- 
promise. 

It  was  plain  that  England  was  far  from  having  sunk  to 
a  slavish  submission  to  the  monarchy.  But  galled  as 
Wolsey  was  by  the  resistance,  his  mind  was  too  full  of 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  123 

vast  schemes  of  foreign  conquest  to  turn  to  any  resolute 
conflict  with  opposition  at  home.  The  treason  of  the  Duke 
of  Bourbon  stirred  a  new  hope  of  conquering  France. 
Bourbon  was  Constable  of  France,  the  highest  of  the 
French  nobles  both  from  his  blood  and  the  almost  inde- 
pendent power  he  wielded  in  his  own  duchy  and  in  Pro- 
vence. But  a  legal  process  by  which  Francis  sought  to  re- 
call his  vast  possessions  to  the  domain  of  the  crown  threat- 
ened him  with  ruin ;  and  driven  to  secret  revolt,  he  pledged 
himself  to  rise  against  the  King  on  the  appearance  of  the 
allied  armies  in  the  heart  of  the  realm.  His  offer  was 
eagerly  accepted,  and  so  confident  were  the  conspirators 
of  success  that  they  at  once  settled  the  division  of  their 
spoil.  To  Henry  his  hopes  seemed  at  last  near  their  real- 
ization ;  and  while  Burgundy  fell  naturally  to  Charles,  his 
ally  claimed  what  remained  of  France  and  the  French 
crown.  The  departure  of  Francis  with  his  army  for  Italy 
was  to  be  the  signal  for  the  execution  of  the  scheme,  a 
joint  army  of  English  and  Imperialists  advancing  to  Bour- 
bon's aid  from  the  north  while  a  force  of  Spaniards  and 
Germans  marched  to  the  same  point  from  the  south.  As 
the  French  troops  moved  to  the  Alps  a  German  force  pen- 
etrated in  August  into  Lorraine,  an  English  army  disem- 
barked at  Calais,  and  a  body  of  Spaniards  descended  from 
the  Pyrenees.  But  at  the  moment  of  its  realization  the 
discovery  of  the  plot  and  an  order  for  his  arrest  foiled 
Bourbon's  designs;  and  his  precipitate  flight  threw  these 
skilful  plans  into  confusion.  Francis  remained  in  his 
realm.  Though  the  army  which  he  sent  over  the  Alps  was 
driven  back  from  the  walls  of  Milan  it  still  held  to  Pied- 
mont, while  the  allied  force  in  northern  France  under  the 
command  of  the  Duke  of  Suffolk  advanced  to  the  Oise  only 
to  find  itself  unsupported  and  to  fall  hastily  back,  and  the 
slow  advance  of  the  Spaniards  frustrated  the  campaign  in 
Guienne.  In  Scotland  alone  a  gleam  of  success  lighted 
on  the  English  arms.  At  the  close  of  the  former  war  Al- 
bany had  withdrawn  to  France  and  Margaret  regained 


124  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

her  power ;  but  a  quarrel  both  with  her  husband  and  the 
English  King  brought  the  Queen-mother  herself  to  invite 
the  Duke  to  return.  On  the  outbreak  of  the  new  struggle 
with  Francis  Henry  at  once  insisted  on  his  withdrawal, 
and  though  Albany  marched  on  England  with  a  large  and 
well-equipped  army,  the  threats  of  the  English  commander 
so  wrought  on  him  that  he  engaged  to  disband  it  and  fled 
over  sea.  Henry  and  his  sister  drew  together  again ;  and 
Margaret  announced  that  her  son,  James  the  Fifth,  who 
had  now  reached  his  twelfth  year,  assumed  the  govern- 
ment as  King,  while  Lord  Surrey  advanced  across  the  bor- 
der to  support  her  against  the  French  party  among  the 
nobles.  But  the  presence  of  an  English  army  roused  the 
whole  people  to  arms.  •  Albany  was  recalled ;  and  Surrey 
saw  himself  forced  to  retreat  while  the  Duke  with  sixty 
thousand  men  crossed  the  border  and  formed  the  siege  of 
Wark.  But  again  his  cowardice  ruined  all.  No  sooner 
did  Surrey,  now  heavily  reinforced,  advance  to  offer  bat- 
tle than  Albany  fell  back  to  Lauder.  Laying  down  the 
regency  he  set  sail  for  France,  and  the  resumption  of  her 
power  by  Margaret  relieved  England  from  its  dread  of  a 
Scotch  attack. 

Baffled  as  he  had  been,  Henry  still  clung  to  his  schemes 
of  a  French  crown ;  and  the  defeat  of  the  French  army  in 
Lombardy  in  1524,  the  evacuation  of  Italy,  and  the  ad- 
vance of  the  Imperialist  troops  into  France  itself  revived 
his  hopes  of  success.  Unable  to  set  an  army  on  foot  in 
Picardy,  he  furnished  the  Emperor  with  supplies  which 
enabled  his  troops  to  enter  the  south.  But  the  selfish  pol- 
icy of  Charles  was  at  once  shown  by  the  siege  of  Mar- 
seilles. While  Henry  had  gained  nothing  from  the  alli- 
ance Charles  had  gained  the  Milanese,  and  he  was  now 
preparing  by  the  conquest  of  Provence  and  the  Mediterra- 
nean coast  to  link  his  possessions  in  Italy  with  his  posses- 
sions in  Spain.  Such  a  project  was  more  practical  and 
statesmanlike  than  the  visions  of  a  conquest  of  France; 
but  it  was  not  to  further  the  Emperor's  greatness  that 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  126 


England  had  wasted  money  and  men.  Henry  felt  that 
he  was  tricked  as  he  had  been  tricked  in  1523.  Then  as 
now  it  was  clearly  the  aim  of  Charles  to  humble  Francis, 
but  not  to  transfer  the  French  crown  to  his  English  ally. 
Nor  was  the  resentment  of  Wolsey  at  the  Emperor's  treach- 
ery less  than  that  of  the  King.  At  the  death  of  Leo  the 
Tenth,  as  at  the  death  of  his  successor,  Charles  had  ful- 
filled his  pledge  to  the  Cardinal  by  directing  his  party  in 
the  Sacred  College  to  support  his  choice.  But  secret  direc- 
tions counteracted  the  open  ones;  and  "Wolsey  had  seen 
the  tutor  of  the  Emperor,  Adrian  the  Sixth,  and  his  par- 
tisan, Clement  the  Seventh,  successively  raised  to  the 
papal  chair.  The  eyes  of  both  King  and  minister  were  at 
last  opened,  and  Henry  drew  cautiously  from  his  ally,  sus- 
pending further  payments  to  Bourbon 'sai  my,  and  opening 
secret  negotiations  with  France.  But  the  face  of  affairs 
was  changed  anew  by  the  obstinate  resistance  of  Marseilles, 
the  ruin  and  retreat  of  the  Imperialist  forces,  and  the  sud- 
den advance  of  Francis  with  a  new  army  over  the  Alps. 
Though  Milan  was  saved  from  his  grasp,  the  Imperial 
troops  were  surrounded  and  besieged  in  Pavia.  For  three 
months  they  held  stubbornly  out,  but  famine  at  last  forced 
them  to  a  desperate  resolve;  and  in  February  1525,  at  a 
moment  when  the  French  army  was  weakened  by  the  dis- 
patch of  forces  to  Southern  Italy,  a  sudden  attack  of  the 
Imperialists  ended  in  a  crushing  victory.  The  French 
were  utterly  routed  and  Francis  himself  remained  a  pris- 
oner in  the  hands  of  the  conquerors.  The  ruin  as  it  seemed 
of  France  roused  into  fresh  life  the  hopes  of  the  English 
King.  Again  drawing  closely  to  Charles  he  offered  to  join 
the  Emperor  in  an  invasion  of  France  with  forty  thousand 
men,  to  head  his  own  forces,  and  to  furnish  heavy  subsi- 
dies for  the  cost  of  the  war.  Should  the  allies  prove  suc- 
cessful and  Henry  be  crowned  King  of  France,  he  pledged 
himself  to  cede  to  Bourbon  Dauphiny  and  his  duchy,  to 
surrender  Burgundy,  Provence,  and  Languedoc  to  the 
Emperor,  and  to  give  Charles  the  hand  of  his  daughter, 


126  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE       [Boca   V. 

Mary,  and  with  it  the  heritage  of  two  crowns  which  would 
in  the  end  make  him  master  of  the  world. 

Though  such  a  project  seemed  hardly  perhaps  as  pos- 
sible to  Wolsey  as  to  his  master  it  served  to  test  the  sincer- 
ity of  Charles  in  his  adhesion  to  the  alliance.  But  whether 
they  were  in  earnest  or  no  in  proposing  it,  King  and  min- 
ister had  alike  to  face  the  difficulty  of  an  empty  treasury. 
Money  was  again  needed  for  action,  but  to  obtain  a  new 
grant  from  parliament  was  impossible,  nor  was  Wolsey 
eager  to  meet  fresh  rebuffs  from  the  spirit  of  the  Commons 
or  the  clergy.  He  was  driven  once  more  to  the  system  of 
Benevolences.  In  every  county  a  tenth  was  demanded 
from  the  laity  and  a  fourth  from  the  clergy  by  the  royal 
commissioners.  But  the  demand  was  met  by  a  general 
resistance.  The  political  instinct  of  the  nation  discerned 
as  of  old  that  in  the  question  of  self -taxation  was  involved 
that  "of  the  very  existence  of  freedom.  The  clergy  put 
themselves  in  the  forefront  of  the  opposition,  and  preached 
from  every  pulpit  that  the  commission  was  contrary  to 
the  liberties  of  the  realm  and  that  the  King  could  take  no 
man's  goods  but  by  process  of  law.  Archbishop  Warham, 
who  was  pressing  the  demand  in  Kent,  was  forced  to  write 
to  the  court  that  "  there  was  sore  grudging  and  murmur- 
ing among  the  people."  "  If  men  should  give  their  goods 
by  a  commission,"  said  the  Kentish  squires,  "then  it  would 
be  worse  than  the  taxes  of  France,  and  England  should  be 
bond,  not  free."  So  stirred  was  the  nation  that  Wolsey 
bent  to  the  storm  and  offered  to  rely  on  the  voluntary  loans 
of  each  subject.  But  the  statute  of  Richard  the  Third 
which  declared  all  exaction  of  Benevolences  illegal  was  re- 
•called  to  memory;  the  demand  was  evaded  by  London, 
and  the  Commissioners  were  driven  out  of  Kent.  A  revolt 
actually  broke  out  among  the  weavers  of  Suffolk ;  the  men 
of  Cambridge  banded  for  resistance;  the  Norwich  cloth- 
iers, though  they  yielded  at  first,  soon  threatened  to  rise. 
"Who  is  your  captain?"  the  Duke  of  Norfolk  asked  the 
crowd.  "  His  name  is  Poverty,"  was  the  answer,  "  for  he 


CHAP,  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  127 

and  his  cousin  Necessity  have  brought  us  to  this  doing." 
There  was  in  fact  a  general  strike  of  the  employers. 
Clothmakers  discharged  their  workers,  farmers  put  away 
their  servants.  "  They  say  the  King  asketh  so  much  that 
they  be  not  able  to  do  as  they  have  done  before  this  time." 
Such  a  peasant  insurrection  as  was  raging  in  Germany  was 
only  prevented  by  the  unconditional  withdrawal  of  the 
royal  demand. 

The  check  was  too  rough  a  one  not  to  rouse  both  Wolsey 
and  the  King.  Henry  was  wroth  at  the  need  of  giving  way 
before  rebels,  and  yet  more  wroth  at  the  blow  which  the 
strife  had  dealt  to  the  popularity  on  which  he  set  so  great 
a  store.  Wolsey  was  more  keenly  hurt  by  the  overthrow 
of  his  hopes  for  a  decisive  campaign.  Without  money 
it  was  impossible  to  take  advantage  of  the  prostration  of 
France  or  bring  the  Emperor  to  any  serious  effort  for  its 
subjection  and  partition.  But  Charles  had  no  purpose  in 
any  case  of  playing  the  English  game,  or  of  carrying  out 
the  pledges  by  which  he  had  lured  England  into  war.  He 
concluded  an  armistice  with  his  prisoner,  and  used  Wolsey's 
French  negotiations  in  the  previous  year  as  a  ground  for 
evading  fulfilment  of  his  stipulations.  The  alliance  was 
in  fact  at  an  end ;  and  the  schemes  of  winning  anew  "  our 
inheritance  of  France,",  had  ended  in  utter  failure.  So 
sharp  a  blow  could  hardly  fail  to  shake  Wolsey's  power. 
The  popular  clamor  against  him  on  the  score  of  the  Be- 
nevolences found  echoes  at  court ;  and  it  was  only  by  a 
dexterous  gift  to  Henry  of  his  newly  built  palace  at  Hamp- 
ton Court  that  Wolsey  again  won  his  old  influence  over 
the  King.  Buried  indeed  as  both  Henry  and  his  minister 
were  in  schemes  of  distant  ambition,  the  sudden  and  gen- 
eral resistance  of  England  woke  them  to  an  uneasy  con- 
sciousness that  their  dream  of  uncontrolled  authority  was 
yet  to  find  hindrances  in  the  temper  of  the  people  they 
ruled.  And  at  this  moment  a  new  and  irresistible  power 
began  to  quicken  the  national  love  of  freedom  and  law. 
It  was  the  influence  of  religion  which  was  destined  to  ruin 


128  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

the  fabric  of  the  Monarchy ;  and  the  year  which  saw  the 
defeat  of  the  Crown  in  its  exaction  of  Benevolences  saw 
the  translation  of  the  English  Bible. 

While  Charles  and  Francis  were  struggling  for  the  lord- 
ship of  the  world,  Germany  had  been  shaken  by  the  out- 
burst of  the  Reformation.  "  That  Luther  has  a  fine 
genius!"  laughed  Leo  the  Tenth  when  he  heard  in  1517 
that  a  German  Professor  had  nailed  some  Propositions  de- 
nouncing the  abuse  of  Indulgences,  or  of  the  Papal  power 
to  remit  certain  penalties  attached  to  the  commission  of 
sins,  against  the  doors  of  a  church  at  Wittemberg.  But 
the  "Quarrel  of  Friars,"  as  the  controversy  was  termed 
contemptuously  at  Rome,  soon  took  larger  proportions.  If 
at  the  outset  Luther  flung  himself  "  prostrate  at  the  feet" 
of  the  Papacy  and  owned  its  voice  as  the  voice  of  Christ, 
the  sentence  of  Leo  no  sooner  confirmed  the  doctrine  of 
Indulgences  than  their  opponent  appealed  to  a  future 
Council  of  the  Church.  In  1520  the  rupture  was  com- 
plete. A  Papal  Bull  formally  condemned  the  errors  of  the 
Reformer,  and  Luther  publicly  consigned  the  Bull  to  the 
flames.  A  second  condemnation  expelled  him  from  the 
bosom  of  the  Church,  and  the  ban  of  the  Empire  was  soon 
added  to  that  of  the  Papacy.  Charles  the  Fifth  had 
bought  Leo's  alliance  with  himself  and  England  by  a 
promise  of  repressing  the  new  heresy ;  and  its  author  was 
called  to  appear  before  him  in  a  Diet  at  Worms.  "  Here 
stand  I;  I  can  none  other,"  Luther  replied  to  the  young 
Emperor  as  he  pressed  him  to  recant ;  and  from  a  hiding- 
place  in  the  Thuringian  forest  where  he  was  sheltered  after 
his  condemnation  by  the  Elector  of  Saxony  he  denounced 
not  merely,  as  at  first,  the  abuses  of  the  Papacy,  but  the 
Papacy  itself.  The  heresies  of  Wyclif  were  revived ;  the 
infallibility,  the  authority  of  the  Roman  See,  the  truth  of 
its  doctrines,  the  efficacy  of  its  worship,  were  denied  and 
scoffed  at  in  vigorous  pamphlets  which  issued  from  his  re- 
treat and  were  dispersed  throughout  the  world  by  the  new 
printing-press.  Germany  welcomed  them  with  enthusi- 


CHAP.  8.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  129 

asm.  Its  old  resentment  against  the  oppression  of  Rome, 
the  moral  revolt  in  its  more  religious  minds  against  the 
secularity  and  corruption  of  the  Church,  the  disgust  of  the 
New  Learning  at  the  superstition  which  the  Papacy  now 
formally  protected,  combined  to  secure  for  Luther  a  wide- 
spread popularity  and  the  protection  of  the  northern  princes 
of  the  Empire. 

In  England  his  protest  seemed  at  first  to  find  no  echo. 
The  King  himself  was  both  on  political  and  religious 
grounds  firm  on  the  Papal  side.  England  and  Rome  were 
drawn  to  a  close  alliance  by  the  identity  of  their  political 
position.  Each  was  hard  pressed  between  the  same  great 
powers ;  Rome  had  to  hold  its  own  between  the  masters  of 
southern  and  the  masters  of  northern  Italy,  as  England 
had  to  hold  her  own  between  the  rulers  of  France  and  of 
the  Netherlands.  From  the  outset  of  his  reign  to  the  actual 
break  with  Clement  the  Seventh  the  policy  of  Henry  is  al- 
ways at  one  with  that  of  the  Papacy.  Nor  were  the  king's 
religious  tendencies  hostile  to  it.  He  was  a  trained  theo- 
logian and  proud  of  his  theological  knowledge,  but  to  the 
end  his  convictions  remained  firmly  on  the  side  of  the 
doctrines  which  Luther  denied.  In  1521  therefore  he  en- 
tered the  lists  against  Luther  with  an  "  Assertion  of  the 
Seven  Sacraments"  for  which  he  was  rewarded  by  Leo 
with  the  title  of  "Defender  of  the  Faith."  The  insolent 
abuse  of  the  Reformer's  answer  called  More  and  Fisher 
into  the  field.  The  influence  of  the  New  Learning  was 
now  strong  at  the  English  Court.  Colet  and  Grocyn  were 
among  its  foremost  preachers ;  Linacre  was  Henry's  phy- 
sician ;  More  was  a  privy  councillor ;  Pace  was  one  of  the 
Secretaries  of  State;  Tunstall  was  Master  of  the  Rolls. 
And  as  yet  the  New  Learning,  though  scared  by  Luther's 
intemperate  language,  had  steadily  backed  him  in  his 
struggle.  Erasmus  pleaded  for  him  with  the  Emperor. 
Ulrich  von  Hutten  attacked  the  friars  in  satires  and  invec- 
tives as  violent  as  his  own.  But  the  temper  of  the  Re- 
nascence was  even  more  antagonistic  to  the  temper  of 


130  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.        [BOOK  V. 

Luther  than  that  of  Rome  itself.  From  the  golden  dream 
of  a  new  age  wrought  peaceably  and  purely  by  the  slow 
progress  of  intelligence,  the  growth  of  letters,  the  develop- 
ment of  human  virtue,  the  Reformer  of  Wittemberg  turned 
away  with  horror.  He  had  little  or  no  sympathy  with 
the  new  culture.  He  despised  reason  as  heartily  as  any 
Papal  dogmatist  could  despise  it.  He  hated  the  very 
thought  of  toleration  or  comprehension.  He  had  been 
driven  by  a  moral  and  intellectual  compulsion  to  declare 
the  Roman  system  a  false  one,  but  it  was  only  to  replace 
it  by  another  system  of  doctrine  just  as  elaborate,  and 
claiming  precisely  the  same  infallibility.  To  degrade  hu- 
man nature  was  to  attack  the  very  base  of  the  New  Learn- 
ing ;  and  his  attack  on  it  called  the  foremost  of  its  teachers 
to  the  field.  But  Erasmus  no  sooner  advanced  to  its  de- 
fence than  Luther  declared  man  to  be  utterly  enslaved  by 
original  sin  and  incapable  through  any  efforts  of  his  own 
of  discovering  truth  or  of  arriving  at  goodness.  Such  a 
doctrine  not  only  annihilated  the  piety  and  wisdom  of  the 
classic  past,  from  which  the  New  Learning  had  drawn  its 
larger  views  of  life  and  of  the  world ;  it  trampled  in  the 
dust  reason  itself,  the  very  instrument  by  which  More  and 
Erasmus  hoped  to  regenerate  both  knowledge  and  religion. 
To  More  especially,  with  his  keener  perception  of  its  future 
effect,  this  sudden  revival  of  a  purely  theological  and  dog- 
matic spirit,  severing  Christendom  into  warring  camps  and 
ruining  all  hopes  of  union  and  tolerance,  was  especially 
hateful.  The  temper  which  hitherto  had  seemed  so  "  en- 
dearing, gentle,  and  happy,"  suddenly  gave  way.  His 
reply  to  Luther's  attack  upon  the  King  sank  to  the  level 
of  the  work  it  answered ;  and  though  that  of  Bishop  Fisher 
was  calmer  and  more  argumentative  the  divorce  of  the 
New  Learning  from  the  Reformation  seemed  complete. 

But  if  the  world  of  scholars  and  thinkers  stood  aloof  from 
the  new  movement  it  found  a  warmer  welcome  in  the  larger 
world  where  men  are  stirred  rather  by  emotion  than  by 
thought.  There  was  an  England  of  which  even  More  and 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  131 

Colet  knew  little  in  which  Luther's  words  kindled  a  fire 
that  was  never  to  die.  As  a  great  social  and  political 
movement  Lollardry  had  ceased  to  exist,  and  little  re- 
mained of  the  directly  religious  impulse  given  by  Wyclif 
beyond  a  vague  restlessness  and  discontent  with  the  system 
of  the  Church.  But  weak  and  fitful  as  was  the  life  of 
Lollardry  the  prosecutions  whose  records  lie  scattered  over 
the  bishops'  registers  failed  wholly  to  kill  it.  We  see 
groups  meeting  here  and  there  to  read  "  in  a  great  book  of 
heresy  all  one  night  certain  chapters  of  the  Evangelists  in 
English,"  while  transcripts  of  Wyclif 's  tracts  passed  from 
hand  to  hand.  The  smouldering  embers  needed  but  a 
breath  to  fan  them  into  flame,  and  the  breath  came  from 
William  Tyndale.  Born  among  the  Cotswolds  when  Bos- 
worth  Field  gave  England  to  the  Tudors,  Tyndale  passed 
from  Oxford  to  Cambridge  to  feel  the  full  impulse  given 
by  the  appearance  there  of  the  New  Testament  of  Erasmus. 
From  that  moment  one  thought  was  at  his  heart.  He 
"  perceived  by  experience  how  that  it  was  impossible  to 
establish  the  lay  people  in  any  truth  except  the  scripture 
were  plainly  laid  before  their  eyes  in  their  mother-tongue." 
"If  God  spare  my  life,"  he  said  to  a  learned  controver- 
sialist, "ere  many  years  I  will  cause  a  boy  that  driveth 
the  plough  shall  know  more  of  the  scripture  than  thou 
dost."  But  he  was  a  man  of  forty  before  his  dream  be- 
came fact.  Drawn  from  his  retirement  in  Gloucestershire 
by  the  news  of  Luther's  protest  at  Wittemberg,  he  found 
shelter  for  a  year  with  a  London  Alderman,  Humfrey 
Monmouth.  "  He  studied  most  part  of  the  day  at  his  book, " 
said  his  host  afterwards,  "  and  would  eat  but  sodden  meat 
by  his  good  will  and  drink  but  small  single  beer."  The 
book  at  which  he  studied  was  the  Bible.  But  it  was  soon 
needful  to  quit  England  if  his  purpose  was  to  hold.  "  I 
understood  at  the  last  not  only  that  there  was  no  room  in 
my  lord  of  London's  palace  to  translate  the  New  Testa- 
ment, but  also  that  there  was  no  place  to  do  it  in  all  Eng- 
land." From  Hamburg,  where  he  took  refuge  in  1524,  he 


132  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

probably  soon  found  his  way  to  the  little  town  which  had. 
suddenly  become  the  sacred  city  of  the  Reformation. 
Students  of  all  nations  were  flocking  there  with  an  enthu- 
siasm which  resembled  that  of  the  Crusades.  "  As  they 
came  in  sight  of  the  town,"  a  contemporary  tells  us,  "  they 
returned  thanks  to  God  with  clasped  hands,  for  from  Wit- 
temberg,  as  heretofore  from  Jerusalem,  the  light  of  evan- 
gelical truth  had  spread  to  the  utmost  parts  of  the  earth." 
Such  a  visit  could  only  fire  Tyndale  to  face  the  "  poverty, 
exile,  bitter  absence  from  friends,  hunger  and  thirst  and 
ccld,  great  dangers,  and  innumerable  other  hard  and  sharp 
fightings,"  which  the  work  he  had  set  himself  was  to  bring 
with  it.  In  1525  his  version  of  the  New  Testament  was 
completed,  and  means  were  furnished  by  English  merchants 
for  printing  it  at  Koln.  But  Tyndale  had  soon  to  fly  with 
his  sheets  to  Worms,  a  city  whose  Lutheran  tendencies 
made  it  a  safer  refuge,  and  it  was  from  Worms  that  six 
thousand  copies  of  the  New  Testament  were  sent  in  1526 
to  English  shores.  The  King  was  keenly  opposed  to  a 
book  which  he  looked  on  as  made  "  at  the  solicitation  and 
instance  of  Luther ;"  and  even  the  men  of  the  New  Learn- 
ing from  whom  it  might  have  hoped  for  welcome  were 
estranged  from  it  by  its  Lutheran  origin.  We  can  only 
fairly  judge  their  action  by  viewing  it  in  the  light  of  the 
time.  What  Warham  and  More  saw  over  sea  might  well 
have  turned  them  from  a  movement  which  seemed  break- 
ing down  the  very  foundations  of  religion  and  society. 
Not  only  was  the  fabric  of  the  Church  rent  asunder  and 
the  centre  of  Christian  unity  denounced  as  "Babylon," 
but  the  reform  itself  seemed  passing  into  anarchy.  Lu- 
ther was  steadily  moving  onward  from  the  denial  of  one 
Catholic  dogma  to  that  of  another ;  and  what  Luther  still 
clung  to  his  followers  were  ready  to  fling  away.  Carlstadt 
was  denouncing  the  reformer  of  Wittemberg  as  fiercely  as 
Luther  himself  had  denounced  the  Pope,  and  meanwhile 
the  religious  excitement  was  kindling  wild  dreams  of  so- 
cial revolution,  and  men  stood  aghast  at  the  horrors  of  a 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  133 

Peasant- War  which  broke  out  in  Southern  Germany.  It 
was  not  therefore  as  a  mere  translation  of  the  Bible  that 
Tyndale's  work  reached  England.  It  came  as  a  part  of 
the  Lutheran  movement,  and  it  bore  the  Lutheran  stamp 
in  its  version  of  ecclesiastical  words.  "  Church"  became 
"congregation,"  "priest"  was  changed  into  "elder."  It 
came  too  in  company  with  Luther's  bitter  invectives  and 
reprints  of  the  tracts  of  Wyclif ,  which  the  German  traders 
of  the  Steelyard  were  importing  in  large  numbers.  We 
can  hardly  wonder  that  More  denounced  the  book  as  heret- 
ical, or  that  Warham  ordered  it  to  be  given  up  by  all  who 
possessed  it. 

Wolsey  took  little  heed  of  religious  matters,  but  his  pol- 
icy was  one  of  political  adhesion  to  Rome,  and  he  presided 
over  a  solemn  penance  to  which  some  Steelyard  men  sub- 
mitted in  St.  Pauls.  "  With  six  and  thirty  abbots,  mitred 
priors,  and  bishops,  and  he  in  his  whole  pomp  mitred"  the 
Cardinal  looked  on  while  "  great  baskets  full  of  books  .  .  . 
were  commanded  after  the  great  fire  was  made  before  the 
Rood  of  Northen,"  the  crucifix  by  the  great  north  door  of 
the  cathedral,  "  thus  to  be  burned,  and  those  heretics  to  go 
thrice  about  the  fire  and  to  cast  in  their  fagots.  But 
scenes  and  denunciations  such  as  these  were  vain  in  the 
presence  of  an  enthusiasm  which  grew  every  hour.  "  Eng- 
lishmen," says  a  scholar  of  the  time,  "  were  so  eager  for  the 
gospel  as  to  affirm  that  they  would  buy  a  New  Testament 
even  if  they  had  to  give  a  hundred  thousand  pieces  of 
money  for  it."  Bibles  and  pamphlets  were  smuggled  over 
to  England  and  circulated  among  the  poorer  and  trading 
classes  through  the  agency  of  an  association  of  "  Christian 
Brethren,"  consisting  principally  of  London  tradesmen  and 
citizens,  but  whose  missionaries  spread  over  the  country 
at  large.  They  found  their  way  at  once  to  the  Universi- 
ties, where  the  intellectual  impulse  given  by  the  New 
Learning  was  quickening  religious  speculation.  Cam- 
bridge had  already  won  a  name  for  heresy;  Barnes,  one 
of  its  foremost  scholars,  had  to  carry  his  fagot  before  Wol- 


134  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

aey  at  St.  Paul's;  two  other  Cambridge  teachers,  Bilney 
and  Latimer,  were  already  known  as  "Lutherans."  The 
Cambridge  scholars  whom  Wolsey  introduced  into  Cardi- 
nal College  which  he  was  founding  spread  the  contagion 
through  Oxford.  A  group  of  "  Brethren"  was  formed  in 
Cardinal  College  for  the  secret  reading  and  discussion  of 
the  Epistles;  and  this  soon  included  the  more  intelligent 
and  learned  scholars  of  the  University.  It  was  in  vain 
that  Clark,  the  centre  of  this  group,  strove  to  dissuade 
fresh  members  from  joining  it  by  warnings  of  the  impend- 
ing dangers.  "  I  fell  down  on  my  knees  at  his  feet,"  says 
one  of  them,  Anthony  Dalaber,  "  and  with  tears  and  sighs 
besought  him  that  for  the  tender  mercy  of  God  he  should 
not  refuse  me,  saying  that  I  trusted  verily  that  he  who  had 
begun  this  on  me  would  not  forsake  me,  but  would  give 
me  grace  to  continue  therein  to  the  end.  When  he  heard 
me  say  so  he  came  to  me,  took  me  in  his  arms,  and  kissed 
me,  saying,  'The  Lord  God  Almighty  grant  you  so  to  do, 
and  from  henceforth  ever  take  me  for  your  father,  and  I 
will  take  you  for  my  son  in  Christ.'" 

In  1528  the  excitement  which  followed  on  this  rapid 
diffusion  of  Tyndale's  works  forced  Wolsey  to  more  vig- 
orous action ;  many  of  the  Oxford  Brethren  were  thrown 
into  prison  and  their  books  seized.  But  in  spite  of  the 
panic  of  the  Protestants,  some  of  whom  fled  over  sea,  little 
severity  was  really  exercised.  Henry's  chief  anxiety  in- 
deed was  lest  in  the  outburst  against  heresy  the  interest 
of  the  New  Learning  should  suffer  harm.  This  was  re- 
markably shown  in  the  protection  he  extended  to  one  who 
was  destined  to  eclipse  even  the  fame  of  Colet  as  a  popular 
preacher.  Hugh  Latimer  was  the  son  of  a  Leicestershire 
yeoman,  whose  armor  the  boy  had  buckled  on  in  Henry 
the  Seventh's  days  ere  he  set  out  to  meet  the  Cornish  in- 
surgents at  Blackheath  field.  Latimer  has  himself  de- 
Tcribed  the  soldierly  training  of  his  youth.  "  My  father 
was  delighted  to  teach  me  to  shoot  with  the  bow.  He 
taught  me  how  to  draw,  how  to  lay  my  body  to  the  bow, 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1540.  135 

not  to  draw  with  strength  of  arm  as  other  nations  do  but 
with  the  strength  of  the  body."  At  fourteen  he  was  at 
Cambridge,  flinging  himself  into  the  New  Learning  which 
was  winning  its  way  there  with  a  zeal  that  at  last  told  on 
his  physical  strength.  The  ardor  of  his  mental  efforts  left 
its  mark  on  him  in  ailments  and  enfeebled  health  from 
which,  vigorous  as  he  was,  his  frame  never  wholly  freed 
itself.  But  he  was  destined  to  be  known,  not  as  a  scholar, 
but  as  a  preacher.  In  his  addresses  from  the  pulpit  the 
sturdy  good  sense  of  the  man  shook  off  the  pedantry  of  the 
schools  as  well  as  the  subtlety  of  the  theologian.  He  had 
little  turn  for  speculation,  and  in  the  religious  changes  of 
the  day  we  find  him  constantly  lagging  behind  his  brother 
reformers.  But  he  had  the  moral  earnestness  of  a  Jewish 
prophet,  and  his  denunciations  of  wrong  had  a  prophetic 
directness  and  fire.  "Have  pity  on  your  soul,"  he  cried 
to  Henry,  "  and  think  that  the  day  is  even  at  hand  when 
you  shall  give  an  account  of  your  office,  and  of  the  blood 
that  hath  been  shed  by  your  sword."  His  irony  was  yet 
more  telling  than  his  invective.  "I  would  ask  you  a 
strange  question;"  he  said  once  at  Paul's  Cross  to  a  ring 
of  Bishops,  "  who  is  the  most  diligent  prelate  in  all  Eng- 
land, that  passeth  all  the  rest  in  doing  of  his  office?  I  will 
tell  you.  It  is  the  Devil !  of  all  the  pack  of  them  that  have 
cure,  the  Devil  shall  go  for  my  money;  for  he  ordereth 
his  business.  Therefore,  you  unpreaching  prelates,  learn 
of  the  Devil  to  be  diligent  in  your  office.  If  you  will  not 
learn  of  God,  for  shame  learn  of  the  Devil."  But  Latimer 
was  far  from  limiting  himself  to  invective.  His  homely 
humor  breaks  in  with  story  and  apologue ;  his  earnestness 
is  always  tempered  with  good  sense ;  his  plain  and  simple 
style  quickens  with  a  shrewd  mother- wit.  He  talks  to  his 
hearers  as  a  man  talks  to  his  friends,  telling  stories  such 
as  we  have  given  of  his  own  life  at  home,  or  chatting  about 
the  changes  and  chances  of  the  day  with  a  transparent 
simplicity  and  truth  that  raises  even  his  chat  into  gran- 
deur. His  theme  is  always  the  actual  world  about  him, 


136  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

and  in  his  simple  lessons  of  loyalty,  of  industry,  of  pity 
for  the  poor,  he  touches  upon  almost  every  subject  from 
the  plough  to  the  throne.  No  such  preaching  had  been 
heard  in  England  before  his  day,  and  with  the  growth  of 
his  fame  grew  the  danger  of  persecution.  There  were 
moments  when,  bold  as  he  was,  Latimer's  heart  failed 
him.  If  I  had  not  trust  that  God  will  help  me,"  he  wrote 
once,  "  I  think  the  ocean  sea  would  have  divided  my  Lord 
of  London  and  me  by  this  day."  A  citation  for  heresy  at 
last  brought  the  danger  home.  "  I  intend,"  he  wrote  with 
his  peculiar  medley  of  humor  and  pathos,  to  "  make  merry 
with  my  parishioners  this  Christmas,  for  all  the  sorrow, 
lest  perchance  I  may  never  return  to  them  again."  But 
he  was  saved  throughout  by  the  steady  protection  of  the 
Court.  Wolsey  upheld  him  against  the  threats  of  the 
Bishop  of  Ely ;  Henry  made  him  his  own  chaplain ;  and 
the  King's  interposition  at  this  critical  moment  forced 
Latimer's  judges  to  content  themselves  with  a  few  vague 
words  of  submission. 

What  really  sheltered  the  reforming  movement  was 
Wolsey's  indifference  to  all  but  political  matters.  In  spite 
of  the  foundation  of  Cardinal  College  in  which  he  was 
now  engaged,  and  of  the  suppression  of  some  lesser  mon- 
asteries for  its  endowment,  the  men  of  the  New  Learning 
looked  on  him  as  really  devoid  of  any  interest  in  the  re- 
vival of  letters  or  in  their  hopes  of  a  general  enlighten- 
ment. He  took  hardly  more  heed  of  the  new  Lutheran- 
ism.  His  mind  had  no  religious  turn,  and  the  quarrel  of 
faiths  was  with  him  simply  one  factor  in  the  political  game 
which  he  was  carrying  on  and  which  at  this  moment  be- 
came more  complex  and  absorbing  than  ever.  The  victory 
of  Pavia  had  ruined  that  system  of  balance  which  Henry 
the  Seventh  and  in  his  earlier  days  Henry  the  Eighth  had 
striven  to  preserve.  But  the  ruin  had  not  been  to  Eng- 
land's profit,  but  to  the  profit  of  its  ally.  While  the  Em- 
peror stood  supreme  in  Europe  Henry  had  won  nothing 
from  the  war,  and  it  was  plain  that  Charles  meant  him  to 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  137 

win  nothing.  He  set  aside  all  projects  of  a  joint  invasion ; 
he  broke  his  pledge  to  wed  Mary  Tudor  and  married  a  prin- 
cess of  Portugal ;  he  pressed  for  a  peace  with  France  which 
would  give  him  Burgundy.  It  was  time  for  Henry  and 
his  minister  to  change  their  course.  They  resolved  to 
withdraw  from  all  active  part  in  the  rivalry  of  the  two 
powers.  In  June,  1525,  a  treaty  was  secretly  concluded 
with  France.  But  Henry  remained  on  fair  terms  with 
the  Emperor ;  and  though  England  joined  the  Holy  League 
for  the  deliverance  of  Italy  from  the  Spaniards  which  was 
formed  between  France,  the  Pope,  and  the  lesser  Italian 
states  on  the  release  of  Francis  in  the  spring  of  1526  by 
virtue  of  a  treaty  which  he  at  once  repudiated,  she  took  no 
part  in  the  lingering  war  which  went  on  across  the  Alps. 
Charles  was  too  prudent  to  resent  Henry's  alliance  with 
his  foes,  and  from  this  moment  the  country  remained  vir- 
tually at  peace.  No  longer  spurred  by  the  interest  of  great 
events,  the  King  ceased  to  take  a  busy  part  in  foreign  poli- 
tics, and  gave  himself  to  hunting  and  sport.  Among  the 
fairest  and  gayest  ladies  of  his  court  stood  Anne  Boleyn. 
She  was  sprung  of  a  merchant  family  which  had  but  lately 
risen  to  distinction  through  two  great  marriages,  that  of 
her  grandfather  with  the  heiress  of  the  Earls  of  Ormond, 
and  that  of  her  father,.  Sir  Thomas  Boleyn,  with  a  sister 
of  the  Duke  of  Norfolk.  It  was  probably  through  his 
kinship  with  the  Duke,  who  was  now  Lord  Treasurer  and 
high  in  the  King's  confidence,  that  Boleyn  was  employed 
throughout  Henry's  reign  in  state  business,  and  his  diplo- 
matic abilities  had  secured  his  appointment  as  envoy  both 
to  France  and  to  the  Emperor.  His  son,  George  Boleyn, 
a  man  of  culture  and  a  poet,  was  among  the  group  of  young 
courtiers  in  whose  society  Henry  took  most  pleasure. 
Anne  was  his  youngest  daughter;  born  in  1507,  she  was 
still  but  a  girl  of  sixteen  when  the  outbreak  of  war  drew 
her  from  a  stay  in  France  to  the  English  court.  Her 
beauty  was  small,  but  her  bright  eyes,  her  flowing  hair, 
he/  gayety  and  wit,  soon  won  favor  with  the  King,  and 


138  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

only  a  month  after  her  return  in  1522  the  grant  of  honors 
to  her  father  marked  her  influence  over  Henry.  Fresh 
gifts  in  the  following  years  showed  that  the  favor  contin- 
ued; but  in  1524  a  new  color  was  given  to  this  intimacy 
by  a  resolve  on  the  King's  part  to  break  his  marriage  with 
the  Queen.  Catharine  had  now  reached  middle  age ;  her 
personal  charms  had  departed.  The  death  of  every  child 
gave  Mary  may  have  woke  scruples  as  to  the  lawfulness 
of  a  marriage  on  which  a  curse  seemed  to  rest ;  the  need 
of  a  male  heir  for  public  security  may  have  deepened  this 
impression.  But  whatever  were  the  grounds  of  his  action 
we  find  Henry  from  this  moment  pressing  the  Roman  see 
to  grant  him  a  divorce. 

It  is  probable  that  the  matter  was  already  mooted  in 
1525,  a  year  which  saw  new  proof  of  Anne's  influence  in 
the  elevation  of  Sir  Thomas  Boleyn  to  the  baronage  as 
Lord  Rochford.  It  is  certain  that  it  was  the  object  of  se- 
cret negotiation  with  the  Pope  in  1526.  -  No  sovereign 
stood  higher  in  the  favor  of  Rome  than  Henry,  whose  alli- 
ance had  ever  been  ready  in  its  distress  and  who  was  even 
now  prompt  with  aid  in  money.  But  Clement's  consent 
to  his  wish  meant  a  break  with  the  Emperor,  Catharine's 
nephew;  and  the  exhaustion  of  France,  the  weakness  of 
the  league  in  which  the  lesser  Italian  states  strove  to  main- 
tain their  independence  against  Charles  after  the  battle  of 
Pavia,  left  the  Pope  at  the  Emperor's  mercy.  While  the 
English  envoy  was  mooting  the  question  of  divorce  in  1526 
the  surprise  of  Rome  by  an  Imperial  force  brought  home 
to  Clement  his  utter  helplessness.  It  is  hard  to  discover 
what  part  Wolsey  had  as  yet  taken  in  the  matter  or  whether 
as  in  other  cases  Henry  had  till  now  been  acting  alone, 
though  the  Cardinal  himself  tells  us  that  on  Catharine's 
first  discovery  of  the  intrigue  she  attributed  the  proposal 
of  divorce  to  "my  procurement  and  setting  forth."  But 
from  this  point  his  intervention  is  clear.  As  legate  he 
took  cognizance  of  all  matrimonial  causes,  and  in  May 
1527  a  collusive  action  was  brought  in  his  court  against 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  139 

Henry  for  cohabiting  with  his  brother's  wife.  The  King 
appeared  by  proctor;  but  the  suit  was  suddenly  dropped. 
Secret  as  were  the  proceedings,  they  had  now  reached 
Catharine's  ear ;  and  as  she  refused  to  admit  the  facts  on 
which  Henry  rested  his  case  her  appeal  would  have  carried 
the  matter  to  the  tribunal  of  the  Pope  and  Clement's  de- 
cision could  hardly  be  a  favorable  one. 

The  Pope  was  now  in  fact  a  prisoner  in  the  Emperor's 
hands.  At  the  very  moment  of  the  suit  Rome  was  stormed 
and  sacked  by  the  army  of  the  Duke  of  Bourbon.  "  If  the 
Pope's  holiness  fortune  either  to  be  slain  or  taken,"  Wol- 
sey  wrote  to  the  King  when  the  news  of  this  event  reached 
England,  "it  shall  not  a  little  hinder  your  Grace's  affairs." 
But  it  was  needful  for  the  Cardinal  to  find  some  expedient 
to  carry  out  the  King's  will,  for  the  group  around  Anne 
were  using  her  skilfully  for  their  purposes.  A  great  party 
had  now  gathered  to  her  support.  Her  uncle,  the  Duke 
of  Norfolk,  an  able  and  ambitious  man,  counted  on  her  rise 
to  set  him  at  the  head  of  the  council-board ;  the  brilliant 
group  of  young  courtiers  to  which  her  brother  belonged 
saw  in  her  success  their  own  elevation;  and  the  Duke  of 
Suffolk  with  the  bulk  of  the  nobles  hoped  through  her 
means  to  bring  about  the  ruin  of  the  statesman  before 
whom  they  trembled.  What  most  served  their  plans  was 
the  growth  of  Henry's  passion.  "If  it  please  you,"  the 
King  wrote  at  this  time  to  Anne  Boleyn,  "  to  do  the  office 
of  a  true,  loyal  mistress,  and  give  yourself  body  and  heart 
to  me,  who  have  been  and  mean  to  be  your  loyal  servant, 
I  promise  you  not  only  the  name  but  that  I  shall  make  you 
my  sole  mistress,  remove  all  others  from  my  affection,  and 
serve  you  only."  What  stirred  Henry's  wrath  most  was 
Catharine's  "  stiff  and  obstinate"  refusal  to  bow  to  his  will. 
Wolsey's  advice  that  "  your  Grace  should  handle  her  both 
gently  and  doulcely"  only  goaded  Henry's  impatience. 
He  lent  an  ear  to  the  rivals  who  charged  his  minister  with 
slackness  in  the  cause,  and  danger  drove  the  Cardinal  to 
a  bolder  and  yet  more  unscrupulous  device.  The  entire 


140  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

subjection  of  Italy  to  the  Emperor  was  drawing  closer  the 
French  alliance ;  and  a  new  treaty  had  been  concluded  in 
April.  But  this  had  hardly  been  signed  when  the  sack  of 
Rome  and  the  danger  of  the  Pope  called  for  bolder  meas- 
ures. Wolsey  was  dispatched  on  a  solemn  embassy  to 
Francis  to  promise  an  English  subsidy  on  the  dispatch  of 
a  French  army  across  the  Alps.  But  he  aimed  at  turning 
the  Pope's  situation  to  the  profit  of  the  divorce.  Clement 
was  virtually  a  prisoner  in  the  Castle  of  St.  Angelo ;  and 
as  it  was  impossible  for  him  to  fulfil  freely  the  function  of 
a  Pope,  Wolsey  proposed  in  conjunction  with  Francis  to 
call  a  meeting  of  the  College  of  Cardinals  at  Avignon 
which  should  exercise  the  papal  powers  till  Clement's  lib- 
eration. As  Wolsey  was  to  preside  over  this  assembly,  it 
would  be  easy  to  win  from  it  a  favorable  answer  to  Henry's 
request. 

But  Clement  had  no  mind  to  surrender  his  power,  and 
secret  orders  from  the  Pope  prevented  the  Italian  Cardi- 
nals from  attending  such  an  assembly.  Nor  was  Wolsey 
more  fortunate  in  another  plan  for  bringing  about  the  same 
end  by  inducing  Clement  to  delegate  to  him  his  full  powers 
westward  of  the  Alps.  Henry's  trust  in  him  was  fast 
waning  before  these  failures  and  the  steady  pressure  of 
his  rivals  at  court,  and  the  coldness  of  the  King  on  his  re- 
turn in  September  was  an  omen  of  his  minister's  fall. 
Henry  was  in  fact  resolved  to  take  his  own  course ;  and 
while  Wolsey  sought  from  the  Pope  a  commission  ena- 
bling him  to  try  the  case  in  his  legatine  court  and  pronounce 
the  marriage  null  and  void  by  sentence  of  law,  Henry  had 
determined  at  the  suggestion  of  the  Boleyns  and  appar- 
ently of  Thomas  Cranmer,  a  Cambridge  scholar  who  was 
serving  as  their  chaplain,  to  seek  without  Wolsey's  knowl- 
edge from  Clement  either  his  approval  of  a  divorce,  or  if 
a  divorce  could  not  be  obtained  a  dispensation  to  re-marry 
without  any  divorce  at  all.  For  some  months  his  envoys 
could  find  no  admission  to  the  Pope;  and  though  in  De- 
cember Clement  succeeded  in  escaping  to  Orvieto  and  drew 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  141 

some  courage  from  the  entry  of  the  French  army  into  Italy, 
his  temper  was  still  too  timid  to  venture  on  any  decided 
course.  He  refused  the  dispensation  altogether.  Wolsey's 
proposal  for  leaving  the  matter  to  a  legatine  court  found 
better  favor;  but  when  the  commission  reached  England 
it  was  found  to  be  "of  no  effect  or  authority."  What 
Henry  wanted  was  not  merely  a  divorce  but  the  express 
sanction  of  the  Pope  to  his  divorce,  and  this  Clement  stead- 
ily evaded.  A  fresh  embassy  with  Wolsey's  favorite  and 
secretary,  Stephen  Gardiner,  at  its  head  reached  Orvieto 
in  March  1528  to  find  in  spite  of  Gardiner's  threats  hardly 
better  success ;  but  Clement  at  last  consented  to  a  legatine 
commission  for  the  trial  of  the  case  in  England.  In  this 
commission  Cardinal  Campeggio,  who  was  looked  upon  as 
a  partisan  of  the  English  King,  was  joined  with  Wolsey. 
Great  as  the  concession  seemed,  this  gleam  of  success 
failed  to  hide  from  the  minister  the  dangers  which  gath- 
ered round  him.  The  great  nobles  whom  he  had  practi- 
cally shut  out  from  the  King's  counsels  were  longing  for 
his  fall.  The  Boleyns  and  the  young  courtiers  looked  on 
him  as  cool  in  Anne's  cause.  He  was  hated  alike  by  men 
of  the  old  doctrine  and  men  of  the  new.  The  clergy  had 
never  forgotten  his  extortions,  the  monks  saw  him  sup- 
pressing small  monasteries.  The  foundation  of  Cardinal 
College  failed  to  reconcile  to  him  the  scholars  of  the  New 
Learning;  their  poet,  Skelton,  was  among  his  bitterest 
assailants.  The  Protestants,  goaded  by  the  persecution 
of  this  very  year,  hated  him  with  a  deadly  hatred.  His 
French  alliances,  his  declaration  of  war  with  the  Emperor, 
hindered  the  trade  with  Flanders  and  secured  the  hostility 
of  the  merchant  class.  The  country  at  large,  galled  with 
murrain  and  famine  and  panic-struck  by  an  outbreak  of 
the  sweating  sickness  which  carried  off  two  thousand  in 
London  alone,  laid  all  its  suffering  at  the  door  of  the  Car- 
dinal. %  And  now  that  Henry's  mood  itself  became  uncer- 
tain Wolsey  knew  his  hour  was  come.  Were  the  marriage 
once  made,  he  told  the  French  ambassador,  and  a  male 


142  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

heir  born  to  the  realm,  he  would  withdraw  from  state 
affairs  and  serve  God  for  the  rest  of  his  life.  But  the  di- 
vorce had  still  to  be  brought  about  ere  marriage  could  be 
made  or  heir  be  born.  Henry  indeed  had  seized  on  the 
grant  of  a  commission  as  if  the  matter  were  at  an  end. 
Anne  Boleyn  was  installed  in  the  royal  palace,  and  hon- 
ored with  the  state  of  a  wife.  .The  new  legate,  Campeggio, 
held  the  bishopric  of  Salisbury,  and  had  been  asked  for  as 
judge  from  the  belief  that  he  would  favor  the  King's  cause. 
But  he  bore  secret  instructions  from  the  Pope  to  bring 
about  if  possible  a  reconciliation  between  Henry  and  the 
Queen,  and  in  no  case  to  pronounce  sentence  without  ref- 
erence to  Rome.  The  slowness  of  his  journey  presaged 
ill;  he  did  not  reach  England  till  the  end  of  September, 
and  a  month  was  wasted  in  vain  efforts  to  bring  Henry  to 
a  reconciliation  or  Catharine  to  retirement  into  a  monas- 
tery. A  new  difficulty  disclosed  itself  in  the  supposed  ex- 
istence of  a  brief  issued  by  Pope  Julius  and  now  in  the 
possession  of  the  Emperor,  which  overruled  all  the  objec- 
tions to  the  earlier  dispensation  on  which  Henry  relied. 
The  hearing  of  the  cause  was  delayed  through  the  winter, 
while  new  embassies  strove  to  induce  Clement  to  declare 
this  brief  also  invalid.  Not  only  was  such  a  demand  glar- 
ingly unjust,  but  the  progress  of  the  Imperial  arms  brought 
vividly  home  to  the  Pope  its  injustice.  The  danger  which 
he  feared  was  not  merely  a  danger  to  his  temporal  domain 
in  Italy.  It  was  a  danger  to  the  Papacy  itself.  It  was 
in  vain  that  new  embassies  threatened  Clement  with  the 
loss  of  his  spiritual  power  over  England.  To  break  with 
the  Emperor  was  to  risk  the  loss  of  his  spiritual  power 
over  a  far  larger  world.  Charles  had  already  consented 
to  the  suspension  of  the  judgment  of  his  diet  at  Worms, 
a  consent  which  gave  security  to  the  new  Protestantism  in 
North  Germany.  If  he  burned  heretics  in  the  Netherlands, 
he  employed  them  in  his  armies.  Lutheran  soldiers  had 
played  their  part  in  the  sack  of  Rome.  Lutheranism  had 
spread  from  North  Germany  along  the  Rhine,  it  was  now 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONAKCHY.    1461-1540.  143 

pushing  fast  into  the  hereditary  possessions  of  the  Austrian 
house,  it  had  all  but  mastered  the  Low  Countries.  France 
itself  was  mined  with  heresy;  and  were  Charles  once  to 
give  way,  the  whole  continent  would  be  lost  to  Kome. 

Amidst  difficulties  such  as  these  the  Papal  court  saw  no 
course  open  save  one  of  delay.  But  the  long  delay  told 
fatally  for  Wolsey's  fortunes.  Even  Clement  blamed  him 
for  having  hindered  Henry  from  judging  the  matter  in 
his  own  realm  and  marrying  on  the  sentence  of  his  own 
courts,  and  the  Boleyns  naturally  looked  upon  his  policy 
as  dictated  by  hatred  to  Anne.  Norfolk  and  the  great 
peers  took  courage  from  the  bitter  tone  of  the  girl ;  and 
Henry  himself  charged  the  Cardinal  with  a  failure  in  ful- 
filling the  promises  he  had  made  him.  King  and  minister 
still  clung  indeed  passionately  to  their  hopes  from  Rome. 
But  in  1529  Charles  met  their  pressure  with  a  pressure  of 
his  own ;  and  the  progress  of  his  arms  decided  Clement 
to  avoke  the  cause  to  Rome.  Wolsey  could  only  hope  to  an- 
ticipate this  decision  by  pushing  the  trial  hastily  forward, 
and  at  the  end  of  May  the  two  Legates  opened  their  court 
in  the  great  hall  of  the  Blackfriars.  King  and  Queen  were 
cited  to  appear  before  them  when  the  court  again  met  on 
the  eighteenth  of  June.  Henry  briefly  announced  his  re- 
solve to  live  no  longer  in  mortal  sin.  The  queen  offered 
an  appeal  to  Clement,  and  on  the  refusal  of  the  Legates  to 
admit  it  flung  herself  at  Henry's  feet.  "  Sire,"  said  Catha- 
rine, "  I  beseech  you  to  pity  me;  a  woman  and  a  stranger, 
without  an  assured  friend  and  without  an  indifferent  coun- 
sellor. I  take  God  to  witness  that  I  have  always  been  to 
you  a  true  and  loyal  wife,  that  I  have  made  it  my  constant 
duty  to  seek  your  pleasure,  that  I  have  loved  all  whom  you 
loved,  whether  I  have  reason  or  not,  whether  they  are 
friends  to  me  or  foes.  I  have  been  your  wife  for  years; 
I  have  brought  you  many  children.  God  knows  that  when 
I  came  to  your  bed  I  was  a  virgin,  and  I  put  it  to  your 
own  conscience  to  say  whether  it  was  not  so.  If  there  be 
any  offence  which  can  be  alleged  against  me  I  consent  to 

7  VOL.   iJ 


144  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

depart  with  infamy ;  if  not,  then  I  pray  you  to  do  me  jus- 
tice." The  piteous  appeal  was  wasted  on  a  King  who  was 
already  entertaining  Anne  Boleyn  with  royal  state  in  his 
own  palace;  the  trial  proceeded,  and  on  the  twenty-third 
of  July  the  court  assembled  to  pronounce  sentence.  Henry 's 
hopes  were  at  their  highest  when  they  were  suddenly 
dashed  to  the  ground.  At  the  opening  of  the  proceedings 
Campeggio  rose  to  declare  the  court  adjourned  to  the  fol- 
lowing October. 

The  adjournment  was  a  mere  evasion.  The  pressure 
of  the  Imperialists  had  at  last  forced  Clement  to  summon 
the  cause  to  his  own  tribunal  at  Rome,  and  the  jurisdic- 
tion of  the  Legates  was  at  an  end.  "Now  see  I,"  cried 
the  Duke  of  Suffolk  as  he  dashed  his  hand  on  the  table, 
"  that  the  old  saw  is  true,  that  there  was  never  Legate  or 
Cardinal  that  did  good  to  England!"  The  Duke  only 
echoed  his  master's  wrath.  Through  the  twenty  years  of 
his  reign  Henry  had  known  nothing  of  opposition  to  his 
will.  His  imperious  temper  had  chafed  at  the  weary  ne- 
gotiations, the  subterfuges  and  perfidies  of  the  Pope. 
Though  the  commission  was  his  own  device,  his  pride 
must  have  been  sorely  galled  by  the  summons  to  the  Leg- 
ates' court.  The  warmest  adherents  of  the  older  faith 
revolted  against  the  degradation  of  the  crown.  "  It  was 
the  strangest  and  newest  sight  and  device,"  says  Caven- 
dish, "that  ever  we  read  or  heard  of  in  any  history  or 
chronicle  in  any  region  that  a  King  and  Queen  should  be 
convented  and  constrained  by  process  compellatory  to  ap- 
pear in  any  court  as  common  persons,  within  their  own 
realm  and  dominion,  to  abide  the  judgment  and  decree  of 
their  own  subjects,  having  the  royal  diadem  and  preroga- 
tive thereof."  Even  this  degradation  had  been  borne  in 
vain.  Foreign  and  Papal  tribunal  as  that  of  the  Legates 
really  was,  it  lay  within  Henry's  kingdom  and  had  the  air 
of  an  English  court.  But  the  citation  to  Rome  was  a 
summons  to  the  King  to  plead  in  a  court  without  his  realm. 
Wolsey  had  himself  warned  Clement  of  the  hopelessness 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1540.  145 

of  expecting  Henry  to  submit  to  such  humiliation  as  this. 
"  If  the  King  be  cited  to  appear  in  person  or  by  proxy  and 
his  prerogative  be  interfered  with,  none  of  his  subjects 
will  tolerate  the  insult.  ...  To  cite  the  King  to  Rome, 
to  threaten  him  with  excommunication,  is  no  more  toler- 
able than  to  deprive  him  of  his  royal  dignity.  ...  If  he 
were  to  appear  in  Italy  it  would  be  at  the  head  of  a  for- 
midable army."  But  Clement  had  been  deaf  to  the  warn- 
ing, and  the  case  had  been  avoked  out  of  the  realm. 

Henry's  wrath  fell  at  once  on  Wolsey.  Whatever  fur- 
therance or  hindrance  the  Cardinal  had  given  to  his  re- 
marriage, it  was  Wolsey  who  had  dissuaded  him  from 
acting  at  the  first  independently,  from  conducting  the 
cause  in  his  own  courts  and  acting  on  the  sentence  of  his 
own  judges.  Whether  to  secure  the  succession  by  a  more 
indisputable  decision  or  to  preserve  uninjured  the  pre- 
rogatives of  the  Papal  see,  it  was  Wolsey  who  had  coun- 
selled him  to  seek  a  divorce  from  Rome  and  promised  him 
success  in  his  suit.  And  in  this  counsel  Wolsey  stood 
alone.  Even  Clement  had  urged  the  King  to  carry  out 
his  original  purpose  when  it  was  too  late.  All  that  the 
Pope  sought  was  to  be  freed  from  the  necessity  of  med- 
dling in  the  matter  at  all.  It  was  Wolsey  who  had  forced 
Papal  intervention  on  him,  as  he  had  forced  it  on  Henry, 
and  the  failure  of  his  plans  was  fatal  to  him.  From  the 
close  of  the  Legatine  court  Henry  would  see  him  no  more, 
and  his  favorite,  Stephen  Gardiner,  who  had  become  chief 
Secretary  of  State,  succeeded  him  in  the  King's  confidence. 
If  Wolsey  still  remained  minister  for  a  while,  it  was  be- 
cause the  thread  of  the  complex  foreign  negotiations  which 
he  was  conducting  could  not  be  roughly  broken.  Here 
too  however  failure  awaited  him.  His  diplomacy  sought 
to  bring  fresh  pressure  on  the  Pope  and  to  provide  a  fresh 
check  on  the  Emperor  by  a  closer  alliance  with  France. 
But  Francis  was  anxious  to  recover  his  children  who  had 
remained  as  hostages  for  his  return ;  he  was  weary  of  the 
long  struggle,  and  hopeless  of  aid  from  his  Italian  allies. 


146  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

At  this  crisis  of  his  fate  therefore  Wolsey  saw  himself  de- 
ceived and  outwitted  by  the  conclusion  of  peace  between 
France  and  the  Emperor  in  a  new  treaty  at  Cambray. 
Not  only  was  his  French  policy  no  longer  possible,  but  a 
reconciliation  with  Charles  was  absolutely  needful,  and 
such  a  reconciliation  could  only  be  brought  about  by  Wol- 
sey's  fall.  In  October,  on  the  very  day  that  the  Cardinal 
took  his  place  with  a  haughty  countenance  and  all  his 
former  pomp  in  the  Court  of  Chancery,  an  indictment  was 
preferred  against  him  by  the  King's  attorney  for  receiving 
bulls  from  Rome  in  violation  of  the  Statute  of  Provisors. 
A  few  days  later  he  was  deprived  of  the  seals.  Wolsey 
was  prostrated  by  the  blow.  In  a  series  of  abject  appeals 
he  offered  to  give  up  everything  that  he  possessed  if  the 
King  would  but  cease  from  his  displeasure.  "  His  face, " 
wrote  the  French  ambassador,  "is  dwindled  to  half  its 
natural  size.  In  truth  his  misery  is  such  that  his  enemies, 
Englishmen  as  they  are,  cannot  help  pitying  him."  For 
the  moment  Henry  seemed  contented  with  his  disgrace. 
A  thousand  boats  full  of  Londoners  covered  the  Thames 
to  see  the  Cardinal's  barge  pass  to  the  Tower,  but  he  was 
permitted  to  retire  to  Esher.  Although  judgment  of  for- 
feiture and  imprisonment  was  given  against  him  in  the 
King's  Bench  at  the  close  of  October,  in  the  following  Feb- 
ruary he  received  a  pardon  on  surrender  of  his  vast  pos- 
sessions to  the  Crown  and  was  permitted  to  withdraw  to 
his  diocese  of  York,  the  one  dignity  he  had  been  suffered 
to  retain. 


CHAPTER  IV. 

THOMAS  CROMWELL. 
1529—1540. 

THE  ten  years  which  follow  the  fall  of  Wolsey  are  among 
the  most  momentous  in  our  history.  The  Monarchy  at 
last  realized  its  power,  and  the  work  for  which  Wolsey 
had  paved  the  way  was  carried  out  with  a  terrible  thor- 
oughness. The  one  great  institution  which  could  still  offer 
resistance  to  the  royal  will  was  struck  down.  The  Church 
became  a  mere  instrument  of  the  central  despotism.  The 
people  learned  their  helplessness  in  rebellions  easily  sup- 
pressed and  avenged  with  ruthless  severity.  A  reign  of 
terror,  organized  with  consummate  and  merciless  skill, 
held  England  panic-stricken  at  Henry's  feet.  The  noblest 
heads  rolled  from  the  block.  Virtue  and  learning  could 
not  save  Thomas  More ;  royal  descent  could  not  save  Lady 
Salisbury.  The  putting  away  of  one  queen,  the  execution 
of  another,  taught  England  that  nothing  was  too  high  for 
Henry's  " courage"  or  too  sacred  for  his  "  appetite."  Par- 
liament assembled  only  to  sanction  acts  of  unscrupulous 
tyranny,  or  to  build  up  by  its  own  statutes  the  fabric  of 
absolute  rule.  All  the  constitutional  safeguards  of  Eng- 
lish freedom  were  swept  away.  Arbitrary  taxation,  ar- 
bitrary legislation,  arbitrary  imprisonment  were  powers 
claimed  without  dispute  and  unsparingly  used  by  the 
Crown. 

The  history  of  this  great  revolution,  for  it  is  nothing 
less,  is  the  history  of  a  single  man.  In  the  whole  line  of 
English  statesmen  there  is  no  one  of  whom  we  would  will- 
ingly know  so  much,  no  one  of  whom  we  really  know  so 
little,  as  of  Thomas  Cromwell.  When  he  meets  us  in 


148  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

Henry's  service  he  had  already  passed  middle  life;  and 
during  his  earlier  years  it  is  hardly  possible  to  do  more 
than  disentangle  a  few  fragmentary  facts  from  the  mass 
of  fable  which  gathered  round  them.  His  youth  was  one 
of  roving  adventure.  Whether  he  was  the  son  of  a  poor 
blacksmith  at  Putney  or  no,  he  could  hardly  have  been 
more  than  a  boy  when  he  was  engaged  in  the  service  of 
the  Marchioness  of  Dorset,  and  he  must  still  have  been 
young  when  he  took  part  as  a  common  soldier  in  the  wars 
of  Italy,  a  "ruffian,"  as  he  owned  afterward  to  Cranmer, 
in  the  most  unscrupulous  school  the  world  contained.  But 
it  was  a  school  in  which  he  learned  lessons  even  more  dan- 
gerous than  those  of  the  camp.  He  not  only  mastered  the 
Italian  language  but  drank  in  the  manners  and  tone  of  the 
Italy  around  him,  the  Italy  of  the  Borgias  and  the  Medici. 
It  was  with  Italian  versatility  that  he  turned  from  the 
camp  to  the  counting-house ;  he  was  certainly  engaged  as 
a  commercial  agent  to  one  of  the  Venetian  traders;  tradi- 
tion finds  him  as  a  clerk  at  Antwerp;  and  in  1512  history 
at  last  encounters  him  as  a  thriving  wool  merchant  at 
Middelburg  in  Zealand. 

Returning  to  England,  Cromwell  continued  to  amass 
wealth  as  years  went  on  by  adding  the  trade  of  scrivener, 
something  between  that  of  a  banker  and  attorney,  to  his 
other  occupations,  as  well  as  by  advancing  money  to  the 
poorer  nobles ;  and  on  the  outbreak  of  the  second  war  with 
France  we  find  him  a  busy  and  influential  member  of  the 
Commons  in  Parliament.  Five  years  later,  in  1528,  the 
aim  of  his  ambition  was  declared  by  his  entering  into 
Wolsey's  service.  The  Cardinal  needed  a  man  of  busi- 
ness for  the  suppression  of  the  smaller  monasteries  which 
he  had  undertaken  as  well  as  for  the  transfer  of  their  rev- 
enues to  his  foundations  at  Oxford  and  Ipswich,  and  he 
showed  his  usual  skill  in  the  choice  of  men  by  finding  such 
an  agent  in  Cromwell.  The  task  was  an  unpopular  one, 
and  it  was  carried  out  with  a  rough  indifference  to  the 
feelings  it  aroused  which  involved  Cromwell  in  the  hate 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  149 

that  was  gathering  round  his  master.  But  his  wonderful 
self-reliance  and  sense  of  power  only  broke  upon  the  world 
at  Wolsey's  fall.  Of  the  hundreds  of  dependents  who 
waited  on  the  Cardinal's  nod,  Cromwell,  hated  and  in  dan- 
ger as  he  must  have  known  himself  to  be,  was  the  only 
one  who  clung  to  his  master  at  the  last.  In  the  lonely 
hours  of  his  disgrace  a,t  Esher  Wolsey  "made  his  moan 
unto  Master  Cromwell,  who  comforted  him  the  best  he 
could,  and  desired  my  Lord  to  give  him  leave  to  go  to 
London,  where  he  would  make  or  mar,  which  was  always 
his  common  saying."  His  plan  was  to  purchase  not  only 
his  master's  safety  but  his  own.  Wolsey  was  persuaded 
to  buy  off  the  hostility  of  the  courtiers  by  giving  his  per- 
sonal confirmation  to  the  prodigal  grants  of  pensions  and 
annuities  which  had  been  already  made  from  his  revenues, 
while  Cromwell  acquired  importance  as  the  go-between  in 
these  transactions.  "Then  began  both  noblemen  and 
others  who  had  patents  from  the  King,"  for  grants  from 
the  Cardinal's  estate,  "to  make  earnest  suit  to  Master 
Cromwell  for  to  solicit  their  causes,  and  for  his  pains 
therein  they  promised  not  only  to  reward  him,  but  to  show 
him  such  pleasure  as  should  be  in  their  power."  But  if 
Cromwell  showed  his  consummate  craft  in  thus  serving 
himself  as  well  as  his  master,  he  can  have  had  no  personal 
reasons  for  the  stand  he  made  in  the  Parliament  which 
was  summoned  in  November  against  a  bill  for  disqualify- 
ing the  Cardinal  for  all  after  employment,  which  was  in- 
troduced by  Norfolk  and  More.  It  was  by  Cromwell  that 
this  was  defeated  and  it  was  by  him  that  the  negotiations 
were  conducted  which  permitted  the  fallen  minister  to 
withdraw  pardoned  to  York. 

A  general  esteem  seems  to  have  rewarded  this  rare  in- 
stance of  fidelity  to  a  ruined  patron.  "  For  his  honest  be- 
havior in  his  master's  cause  he  was  esteemed  the  most 
faithfullest  servant,  and  was  of  all  men  greatly  com- 
mended." Cromwell  however  had  done  more  than  save 
himself  from  ruin.  The  negotiations  for  Wolsey's  pen- 


150  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

sions  had  given  him  access  to  the  King,  and  "  by  his  witty 
demeanor  he  grew  continually  in  the  King's  favor."  But 
the  favor  had  been  won  by  more  than  "witty  demeanor." 
In  a  private  interview  with  Henry  Cromwell  boldly  ad- 
vised him  to  cut  the  knot  of  the  divorce  by  the  simple  exer- 
cise of  his  own  supremacy.  The  advice  struck  the  key- 
note of  the  later  policy  by  which  the  daring  counsellor  was 
to  change  the  whole  face  of  Church  and  State ;  but  Henry 
still  clung  to  the  hopes  held  out  by  the  new  ministers  who 
had  followed  Wolsey,  and  shrank  perhaps  as  yet  from  the 
bare  absolutism  to  which  Cromwell  called  him.  The  ad- 
vice at  any  rate  was  concealed ;  and,  though  high  in  the 
King's  favor,  his  new  servant  waited  patiently  the  progress 
of  events. 

The  first  result  of  Wolsey's  fall  was  a  marked  change  in 
the  system  of  administration.  Both  the  Tudor  Kings  had 
carried  on  their  government  mainly  through  the  agency  of 
great  ecclesiastics.  Archbishop  Morton  and  Bishop  Fox 
had  been  successively  ministers  of  Henry  the  Seventh. 
Wolsey  had  been  the  minister  of  Henry  the  Eighth.  But 
with  the  ruin  of  the  Cardinal  the  rule  of  the  churchmen 
ceased.  The  seals  were  given  to  Sir  Thomas  More.  The 
real  direction  of  affairs  lay  in  the  hands  of  two  great 
nobles,  of  the  Duke  of  Suffolk  who  was  President  of  the 
Council,  and  of  the  Lord  Treasurer, .Thomas  Howard,  the 
Duke  of  Norfolk.  From  this  hour  to  the  close  of  the  age 
of  the  Tudors  the  Howards  were  to  play  a  prominent  part 
in  English  history.  They  had  originally  sprung  from  the 
circle  of  lawyers  who  rose  to  wealth  and  honor  through 
their  employment  by  the  crown.  Their  earliest  known 
ancestor  was  a  judge  under  Edward  the  First ;  and  his  de- 
scendants remained  wealthy  landowners  in  the  eastern 
counties  till  early  in  the  fifteenth  century  they  were  sud- 
denly raised  to  distinction  by  the  marriage  of  Sir  Robert 
Howard  with  a  wife  who  became  heiress  of  the  houses  of 
Arundel  and  Norfolk,  the  Fitz- Alans  and  the  Mowbrays. 
John  Howard,  the  issue  of  this  marriage,  was  a  prominent 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  151 

Yorkist  and  stood  high  in  the  favor  of  the  Yorkist  kings. 
He  was  one  of  the  councillors  of  Edward  the  Fourth,  and 
received  from  Richard  the  Third  the  old  dignities  of  the 
house  of  Mowbray,  the  office  of  Earl  Marshal  and  the 
Dukedom  of  Norfolk.  But  he  had  hardly  risen  to  great- 
ness when  he  fell  fighting  by  Richard's  side  at  Bosworth 
Field.  His  son  was  taken  prisoner  in  the  same  battle  and 
remained  for  three  years  in  the  Tower.  But  his  refusal  to 
join  in  the  rising  of  the  Earl  of  Lincoln  was  rewarded  by 
Henry  the  Seventh  with  his  release,  his  restoration  to  the 
Earldom  of  Surrey,  and  his  employment  in  the  service  of 
the  crown  where  he  soon  took  rank  among  the  king's  most 
trusted  councillors.  His  military  abilities  were  seen  in 
campaigns  against  the  Scots  which  won  back  for  him  the 
office  of  Earl  Marshal,  and  in  the  victory  of  Flodden  which 
restored  to  him  the  Dukedom  of  Norfolk.  The  son  of  this 
victor  of  Flodden,  Thomas,  Earl  of  Surrey,  had  already 
served  as  lieutenant  in  Ireland  and  as  general  against  Al- 
bany on  the  Scottish  frontier  before  his  succession  to  the 
dukedom  in  1524.  His  coolness  and  tact  had  displayed 
themselves  during  the  revolt  against  Benevolences,  when 
his  influence  alone  averted  a  rising  in  the  Eastern  Coun- 
ties. Since  Buckingham's  death  his  house  stood  at  the 
head  of  the  English  nobility :  his  office  of  Lord  Treasurer 
placed  him  high  at  the  royal  council  board ;  and  Henry's 
love  for  his  niece,  Anne  Boleyn,  gave  a  fresh  spur  to  the 
duke's  ambition.  But  his  influence  had  till  now  been 
overshadowed  by  the  greatness  of  Wolsey.  With  the 
Cardinal's  fall  however  he  at  once  came  to  the  front. 
Though  he  had  bowed  to  the  royal  policy,  he  was  known 
as  the  leader  of  the  party  which  clung  to  alliance  with  the 
Emperor,  and  now  that  such  an  alliance  was  needful  Henry 
counted  on  Norfolk  to  renew  the  friendship  with  Charles. 
An  even  greater  revolution  was  seen  in  the  summons  of 
a  Parliament  which  met  in  November  1529.  Its  assembly 
was  no  doubt  prompted  in  part  by  the  actual  needs  of  the 
Crown,  for  Henry  was  not  only  penniless  but  overwhelmed 


152  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

with  debts  and  Parliament  alone  could  give  him  freedom 
from  these  embarrassments.  But  the  importance  of  the 
questions  brought  before  the  Houses,  and  their  repeated 
assembly  throughout  the  rest  of  Henry's  reign,  point  to  a 
definite  change  in  the  royal  system.  The  policy  of  Ed-» 
ward  the  Fourth,  of  Henry  the  Seventh,  and  of  Wolsey 
was  abandoned.  Instead  of  looking  on  Parliament  as  a 
danger  the  monarchy  now  felt  itself  strong  enough  to  use 
it  as  a  tool.  The  obedience  of  the  Commons  was  seen  in 
the  readiness  with  which  they  at  once  passed  a  bill  to  re- 
lease the  crown  from  its  debts.  But  Henry  counted  on 
more  than  obedience.  He  counted,  and  justly  counted,  on 
the  warm  support  of  the  Houses  in  his  actual  strife  with 
Rome.  The  plan  of  a  divorce  was  no  doubt  unpopular. 
So  violent  was  the  indignation  against  Anne  Boleyn  that 
she  hardly  dared  to  stir  abroad.  But  popular  feeling  ran 
almost  as  bitterly  against  the  Papacy.  The  sight  of  an 
English  King  and  an  English  Queen  pleading  before  a 
foreign  tribunal  revived  the  old  resentment  against  the 
subjection  of  Englishmen  to  Papal  courts.  The  helpless- 
ness of  Clement  in  the  grasp  of  the  Emperor  recalled  the 
helplessness  of  the  Popes  at  Avignon  in  the  grasp  of  the 
Kings  of  France.  That  Henry  should  sue  for  justice  to 
Rome  was  galling  enough,  but  the  hottest  adherent  of  the 
Papacy  was  outraged  when  the  suit  of  his  King  was 
granted  or  refused  at  the  will  of  Charles.  It  was  against 
this  degradation  of  the  Crown  that  the  Statutes  of  Pro- 
visors  and  Praemunire  had  been  long  since  aimed.  The 
need  of  Papal  support  to  their  disputed  title  which  had 
been  felt  by  the  houses  of  Lancaster  and  York  had  held 
these  statutes  in  suspense,  and  the  Legatine  Court  of  Wol- 
sey had  openly  defied  them.  They  were  still  however 
legally  in  force;  they  were  part  of  the  Parliamentary 
tradition;  and  it  was  certain  that  Parliament  would  be  as 
ready  as  ever  to  enforce  the  independent  jurisdiction  of 
the  Crown. 
Not  less  significant  was  the  attitude  of  the  New  Learn- 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  153 

ing.  On  Wolsey's  fail  the  seals  had  been  offered  to  War- 
ham,  and  it  was  probably  at  his  counsel  that  they  were 
finally  given  to  Sir  Thomas  More.  The  chancellor's  dream, 
if  we  may  judge  it  from  the  acts  of  his  brief  ministry, 
seems  to  have  been  that  of  carrying  out  the  religious  ref- 
ormation which  had  been  demanded  by  Colet  and  Erasmus 
while  checking  the  spirit  of  revolt  against  the  unity  of  the 
Church.  His  severities  against  the  Protestants,  exagger- 
ated as  they  have  been  by  polemic  rancor,  remain  the 
one  stain  on  a  memory  that  knows  no  other.  But  it  was 
only  by  a  rigid  severance  of  the  cause  of  reform  from  what 
seemed  to  him  the  cause  of  revolution  that  More  could 
hope  for  a  successful  issue  to  the  projects  of  reform  which 
the  council  laid  before  Parliament.  The  Petition  of  the 
Commons  sounded  like  an  echo  of  Colet 's  famous  address 
to  the  Convocation.  It  attributed  the  growth  of  heresy 
not  more  to  "  frantic  and  seditious  books  published  in  the 
English  tongue  contrary  to  the  very  true  Catholic  and 
Christian  faith"  than  to  "the  extreme  and  uncharitable 
behavior  of  divers  ordinaries."  It  remonstrated  against 
the  legislation  of  the  clergy  in  Convocation  without  the 
King's  assent  or  that  of  his  subjects,  the  oppressive  pro- 
cedure of  the  Church  Courts,  the  abuses  of  ecclesiastical 
patronage,  and  the  excessive  number  of  holydays.  Henry 
referred  the  Petition  to  the  bishops,  but  they  could  devise 
no  means  of  redress,  and  the  ministry  persisted  in  pushing 
through  the  Houses  their  bills  for  ecclesiastical  reform. 
The  importance  of  the  new  measures  lay  really  in  the  ac- 
tion of  Parliament.  They  were  an  explicit  announcement 
that  church-reform  was  now  to  be  undertaken,  not  by  the 
clergy,  but  by  the  people  at  large.  On  the  other  hand  it 
was  clear  that  it  would  be  carried  out  in  a  spirit  of  loyalty 
to  the  church.  The  Commons  forced  from  Bishop  Fisher 
an  apology  for  words  which  were  taken  as  a  doubt  thrown 
on  their  orthodoxy.  Henry  forbade  the  circulation  of 
Tyndale's  translation  of  the  Bible  as  executed  in  a  Protes- 
tant spirit.  The  reforming  measures  however  were  pushed 


154  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

resolutely  on.  Though  the  questions  of  Convocation  and 
the  Bishops'  courts  were  adjourned  for  further  considera- 
tion, the  fees  of  the  courts  were  curtailed,  the  clergy  re- 
stricted from  lay  employments,  pluralities  restrained,  and 
residence  enforced.  In  spite  of  a  dogged  opposition  from 
the  bishops  the  bills  received  the  assent  of  the  House  of 
Lords,  "  to  the  great  rejoicing  of  lay  people,  and  the  great 
displeasure  of  spiritual  persons." 

Not  less  characteristic  of  the  New  Learning  was  the  in- 
tellectual pressure  it  strove  to  bring  to  bear  on  the  wavering 
Pope.  Cranmer  was  still  active  in  the  cause  of  Anne 
Boleyn ;  he  had  just  published  a  book  in  favor  of  the  di- 
vorce ;  and  he  now  urged  on  the  ministry  an  appeal  to  the 
learned  opinion  of  Christendom  by  calling  for  the  judgment 
of  the  chief  universities  of  Europe.  His  counsel  was 
adopted ;  but  Norfolk  trusted  to  coarser  means  of  attaining 
his  end.  Like  most  of  the  English  nobles  and  the  whole 
of  the  merchant  class,  his  sympathies  were  with  the  House 
of  Burgundy ;  he  looked  upon  Wolsey  as  the  real  hindrance 
to  the  divorce  through  the  French  policy  which  had  driven 
Charles  into  a  hostile  attitude ;  and  he  counted  on  the  Car- 
dinal's fall  to  bring  about  a  renewal  of  friendship  with  the 
Emperor  and  to  insure  his  support.  The  father  of  Anne 
Boleyn,  now  created  Earl  of  Wiltshire,  was  sent  in  1530 
on  this  errand  to  the  Imperial  Court.  But  Charles  re- 
mained firm  to  Catharine's  cause,  and  Clement  would  do 
nothing  in  defiance  of  the  Emperor.  Nor  was  the  appeal 
to  the  learned  world  more  successful.  In  France  the  pro- 
fuse bribery  of  the  English  agents  would  have  failed  with 
the  university  of  Paris  but  for  the  interference  of  Francis 
himself,  eager  to  regain  Henry's  goodwill  by  this  office  of 
friendship.  As  shameless  an  exercise  of  the  King's  own 
authority  was  needed  to  wring  an  approval  of  his  cause 
from  Oxford  and  Cambridge.  In  Germany  the  very  Prot- 
estants, then  in  the  fervor  of  their  moral  revival  and  hop- 
ing little  from  a  proclaimed  opponent  of  Luther,  were  dead 
against  the  King.  So  far  as  could  be  seen  from  Cranmer's 


"'  CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461—1540.  155 

test  every  learned  man  in  Christendom  but  for  bribery  and 
threats  would  have  condemned  the  royal  cause.  Henry 
was  embittered  by  failures  which  he  attributed  to  the  un- 
skilful diplomacy  of  his  new  counsellors;  and  it  was  ru- 
mored that  he  had  been  heard  to  regret  the  loss  of  the  more 
dexterous  statesman  whom  they  had  overthrown.  Wolsey 
who  since  the  beginning  of  the  year  had  remained  at  York, 
though  busy  in  appearance  with  the  duties  of  his  see,  was 
hoping  more  and  more  as  the  months  passed  by  for  his  re- 
call. But  the  jealousy  of  his  political  enemies  was  roused 
by  the  King's  regrets,  and  the  pitiless  hand  of  Norfolk 
was  seen  in  the  quick  and  deadly  blow  which  he  dealt  at 
his  fallen  rival.  On  the  fourth  of  November,  on  the  eve 
of  his  installation  feast,  the  Cardinal  was  arrested  on  a 
charge  of  high  treason  and  conducted  by  the  Lieutenant 
of  the  Tower  toward  London.  Already  broken  by  his 
enormous  labors,  by  internal  disease,  and  the  sense  of  his 
fall,  Wolsey  accepted  the  arrest  as  a  sentence  of  death. 
An  attack  of  dysentery  forced  him  to  rest  at  the  abbey  of 
Leicester,  and  as  he  reached  the  gate  he  said  feebly  to  the 
brethren  who  met  him,  "I  am  come  to  lay  my  bones 
among  you."  On  his  death-bed  his  thoughts  still  clung 
to  the  prince  whom  he  had  served.  "  Had  I  but  served 
God  as  diligently  as  I  have  served  the  king,"  murmured 
the  dying  man,  "  He  would  not  have  given  me  over  in  my 
gray  hairs.  But  this  is  my  due  reward  for  my  pains  and 
study,  not  regarding  my  service  to  God,  but  only  my  duty 
to  my  prince." 

No  words  could  paint  with  so  terrible  a  truthfulness  the 
spirit  of  the  new  despotism  which  Wolsey  had  done  more 
than  any  of  those  who  went  before  him  to  build  up.  From 
tempers  like  his  all  sense  of  loyalty  to  England,  to  its  free- 
dom, to  its  institutions,  had  utterly  passed  away,  and  the 
one  duty  which  the  statesman  owned  was  a  duty  to  his 
"prince."  To  what  issues  such  a  conception  of  a  states- 
man's duty  might  lead  was  now  to  be  seen  in  the  career 
of  a  greater  than  Wolsey.  The  two  dukes  had  stmck 


156  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

down  the  Cardinal  only  to  set  up  another  master  in  his 
room.  Since  his  interview  with  Henry  Cromwell  had  re- 
mained in  the  King's  service,  where  his  steady  advance 
in  the  royal  favor  was  marked  by  his  elevation  to  the  post 
of  secretary  of  state.  His  patience  was  at  last  rewarded 
by  the  failure  of  the  policy  for  which  his  own  had  been  set 
aside.  At  the  close  of  1530  the  college  of  cardinals  for- 
mally rejected  the  King's  request  for  leave  to  decide  the 
whole  matter  in  his  own  spiritual  courts ;  and  the  defeat 
of  Norfolk's  project  drove  Henry  nearer  and  nearer  to  the 
bold  plan  from  which  he  had  shrunk  at  Wolsey's  fall 
Cromwell  was  again  ready  with  his  suggestion  that  the 
King  should  disavow  the  Papal  jurisdiction,  declare  him- 
self Head  of  the  Church  within  his  realm,  and  obtain  a  di- 
vorce from  his  own  Ecclesiastical  Courts.  But  he  looked 
on  the  divorce  as  simply  the  prelude  to  a  series  of  changes 
which  the  new  minister  was  bent  upon  accomplishing.  In 
all  his  checkered  life  what  had  left  its  deepest  stamp  on 
him  was  Italy.  Not  only  in  the  rapidity  and  ruthlessness 
of  his  designs,  but  in  their  larger  scope,  their  clearer  pur- 
pose, and  their  admirable  combination,  the  Italian  state- 
craft entered  with  Cromwell  into  English  politics.  He  is 
in  fact  the  first  English  minister  in  whom  we  can  trace 
through  the  whole  period  of  his  rule  the  steady  working 
out  of  a  great  and  definite  aim,  that  of  raising  the  King 
to  absolute  authority  on  the  ruins  of  every  rival  power 
within  the  realm.  It  was  not  that  Cromwell  was  a  mere 
slave  of  tyranny.  Whether  we  may  trust  the  tale  that 
carries  him  in  his  youth  to  Florence  or  no,  his  statesman- 
ship was  closely  modelled  on  the  ideal  of  the  Florentine 
thinker  whose  book  was  constantly  in  his  hand.  Even  as 
a  servant  of  Wolsey  he  startled  the  future  Cardinal,  Regi- 
nald Pole,  by  bidding  him  take  for  his  manual  in  politics 
the  "  Prince"  of  Machiavelli.  Machiavelli  hoped  to  find  in 
Ca3sar  Borgia  or  in  the  later  Lorenzo  de'  Medici  a  tyrant 
who  after  crushing  all  rival  tyrannies  might  unite  and  re- 
generate Italy;  and  terrible  and  ruthless  as  his  policy  was, 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONAKCHY.     1461-1540.  157 

the  final  aim  of  Cromwell  seems  to  have  been  that  of  Machi- 
avelli,  an  aim  of  securing  enlightenment  and  order  for 
England  by  the  concentration  of  all  authority  in  the  crown. 
The  first  step  toward  such  an  end  was  the  freeing  the 
monarchy  from  its  spiritual  obedience  to  Rome.  What 
the  first  of  the  Tudors  had  done  for  the  political  independ- 
ence of  the  kingdom,  the  second  was  to  do  for  its  ecclesi- 
astical independence.  Henry  the  Seventh  had  freed  Eng- 
land from  the  interference  of  France  or  the  House  of 
Burgundy;  and  in  the  question  of  the  divorce  Cromwell 
saw  the  means  of  bringing  Henry  the  Eighth  to  free  it 
from  the  interference  of  the  Papacy.  In  such  an  effort  re- 
sistance could  be  looked  for  only  from  the  clergy.  But 
their  resistance  was  what  Cromwell  desired.  The  last 
check  on  royal  absolutism  which  had  survived  the  Wars 
of  the  Roses  lay  in  the  wealth,  the  independent  synods  and 
jurisdiction,  and  the  religious  claims  of  the  church ;  and 
for  the  success  of  the  new  policy  it  was  necessary  to  reduce 
the  great  ecclesiastical  body  to  a  mere  department  of  the 
State  in  which  all  authority  should  flow  from  the  sove- 
reign alone,  his  will  be  the  only  law,  his  decision  the  only 
test  of  truth.  Such  a  change  however  was  hardly  to  be 
wrought  without  a  struggle ;  and  the  question  of  national 
independence  in  all  ecclesiastical  matters  furnished  ground 
on  which  the  crown  could  conduct  this  struggle  to  the  best 
advantage.  The  secretary's  first  blow  showed  how  un- 
scrupulously the  struggle  was  to  be  waged.  A  year  had 
passed  since  Wolsey  had  been  convicted  of  a  breach  of  the 
Statute  of  Provisors.  The  pedantry  of  the  judges  declared 
the  whole  nation  to  have  been  formally  involved  in  the 
same  charge  by  its  acceptance  of  his  authority.  The  legal 
absurdity  was  now  redressed  by  a  general  pardon,  but  from 
this  pardon  the  clergy  found  themselves  omitted.  In  the 
spring  of  1531  Convocation  was  assembled  to  be  told  that 
forgiveness  could  be  bought  at  no  less  a  price  than  the 
payment  of  a  fine  amounting  to  a  million  of  our  present 
money  and  the  acknowledgment  of  the  King  as  "the  chief 


158  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

protector,  the  only  and  supreme  lord,  and  Head  of  the 
Church  and  Clergy  of  England."  Unjust  as  was  the  first 
demand,  they  at  once  submitted  to  it ;  against  the  second 
they  struggled  hard.  But  their  appeals  to  Henry  and 
Cromwell  met  only  with  demands  for  instant  obedience. 
A  compromise  was  at  last  arrived  at  by  the  insertion  of  a 
qualifying  phrase  "  So  far  as  the  law  of  Christ  will  allow ;" 
and  with  this  addition  the  words  were  again  submitted  by 
Warham  to  the  Convocation.  There  was  a  general  silence. 
"  Whoever  is  silent  seems  to  consent,"  said  the  Archbishop. 
"Then  are  we  all  silent,"  replied  a  voice  from  among  the 
crowd. 

There  is  no  ground  for  thinking  that  the  "  Headship  of 
the  Church"  which  Henry  claimed  in  this  submission  was 
more  than  a  warning  addressed  to  the  independent  spirit 
of  the  clergy,  or  that  it  bore  as  yet  the  meaning  which 
was  afterward  attached  to  it.  It  certainly  implied  no  in- 
dependence of  Rome,  for  negotiations  were  still  being  car- 
ried on  with  the  Papal  Court.  But  it  told  Clement  plainly 
that  in  any  strife  that  might  come  between  himself  and 
Henry  the  clergy  were  in  the  King's  hand,  and  that  he 
must  look  for  no  aid  from  them  in  any  struggle  with  the 
crown.  The  warning  was  backed  by  an  address  to  the 
Pope  from  the  Lords  and  some  of  the  Commons  who  as- 
sembled after  a  fresh  prorogation  of  the  Houses  in  the 
spring.  "  The  cause  of  his  Majesty,"  the  Peers  were  made 
to  say,  "is  the  cause  of  each  of  ourselves."  They  laid  be- 
fore the  Pope  what  they  represented  as  the  judgment  of 
the  Universities  in  favor  of  the  divorce ;  but  they  faced 
boldly  the  event  of  its  rejection.  "Our  condition,"  they 
ended,  "  will  not  be  wholly  irremediable.  Extreme  reme- 
dies are  ever  harsh  of  application ;  but  he  that  is  sick  will 
by  all  means  be  rid  of  his  distemper."  In  the  summer  the 
banishment  of  Catharine  from  the  King's  palace  to  a  house 
at  Ampthill  showed  the  firmness  of  Henry's  resolve.  Each 
of  these  acts  were  no  doubt  intended  to  tell  on  the  Pope's 
decision,  for  Henry  still  clung  to  the  hope  of  extorting  from 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  159 

Clement  a  favorable  answer,  and  at  the  close  of  the  year 
a  fresh  embassy  with  Gardiner,  now  Bishop  of  Winches- 
ter, at  its  head  was  dispatched  to  the  Papal  Court.  But 
the  embassy  failed  like  its  predecessors,  and  at  the  opening 
of  1532  Cromwell  was  free  to  take  more  decisive  steps  in 
the  course  on  which  he  had  entered. 

What  the  nature  of  his  policy  was  to  be  had  already 
been  detected  by  eyes  as  keen  as  his  own.  More  had  seen 
in  Wolsey's  fall  an  opening  for  the  realization  of  those 
schemes  of  religious  and  even  of  political  reform  on  which 
the  scholars  of  the  New  Learning  had  long  been  brooding. 
The  substitution  of  the  Lords  of  the  Council  for  the  auto- 
cratic rule  of  the  Cardinal-minister,  the  break-up  of  the 
great  mass  of  powers  which  had  been  gathered  into  a  sin- 
gle hand,  the  summons  of  a  Parliament,  the  ecclesiastical 
reforms  which  it  at  once  sanctioned,  were  measures  which 
promised  a  more  legal  and  constitutional  system  of  govern- 
ment. The  question  of  the  divorce  presented  to  More  no 
serious  difficulty.  Untenable  as  Henry's  claim  seemed  to 
the  new  Chancellor,  his  faith  in  the  omnipotence  of  Par- 
liament would  have  enabled  him  to  submit  to  any  statute 
which  named  a  new  spouse  as  Queen  and  her  children  as 
heirs  to  the  crown.  But  as  Cromwell's  policy  unfolded 
itself  he  saw  that  more  than  this  was  impending.  The 
Catholic  instinct  of  his  mind,  the  dread  of  a  rent  Chris- 
tendom and  of  the  wars  and  bigotry  that  must  come  of  its 
rending,  united  with  More's  theological  convictions  to  re* 
sist  any  spiritual  severance  of  England  from  the  Papacy. 
His  love  for  freedom,  his  revolt  against  the  growing  autoc- 
racy of  the  crown,  the  very  height  and  grandeur  of  his 
own  spiritual  convictions,  all  bent  him  to  withstand  a  sys- 
tem which  would  concentrate  in  the  King  the  whole  power 
of  Church  as  of  State,  would  leave  him  without  the  one 
check  that  remained  on  his  despotism,  and  make  him  ar- 
biter of  the  religious  faith  of  his  subjects.  The  later  re- 
volt of  the  Puritans  against  the  King- worship  which  Crom- 
well established  proved  the  justice  of  the  provision  which 


160  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.        [BOOK  V. 

forced  More  in  the  spring  of  1532  to  resign  the  post  of 
Chancellor. 

But  the  revolution  from  which  he  shrank  was  an  inevi- 
table one.  Till  now  every  Englishman  had  practically 
owned  a  double  life  and  a  double  allegiance.  As  citizen 
of  a  temporal  state  his  life  was  bounded  by  English  shores 
and  his  loyalty  due  exclusively  to  his  English  King.  But 
as  citizen  of  the  state  spiritual  he  belonged  not  to  England, 
but  to  Christendom.  The  law  which  governed  him  was 
not  a  national  law  but  a  law  that  embraced  every  Euro- 
pean nation,  and  the  ordinary  course  of  judicial  appeals  in 
ecclesiastical  cases  proved  to  him  that  the  sovereignty  in 
all  matters  of  conscience  or  religion  lay  not  at  Westmin- 
ster but  at  Rome.  Such  a  distinction  could  scarcely  fail 
to  bring  embarrassment  with  it  as  the  sense  of  national 
life  and  national  pride  waxed  stronger ;  and  from  the  reign 
of  the  Edwards  the  problem  of  reconciling  the  spiritual 
and  temporal  relations  of  the  realm  grew  daily  more  diffi- 
cult. Parliament  had  hardly  risen  into  life  when  it  be- 
came the  organ  of  the  national  jealousy,  whether  of  any 
Papal  jurisdiction  without  the  realm  or  of  the  separate 
life  and  separate  jurisdiction  of  the  clergy  within  it.  The 
movement  was  long  arrested  by  religious  reaction  and  civil 
war.  But  the  fresh  sense  of  national  greatness  which 
sprang  from  the  policy  of  Henry  the  Eighth,  the  fresh 
sense  of  national  unity  as  the  Monarchy  gathered  all  power 
into  its  single  hand,  would  have  itself  revived  the  contest 
even  without  the  spur  of  the  divorce.  What  the  question 
of  the  divorce  really  did  was  to  stimulate  the  movement 
by  bringing  into  clearer  view  the  wreck  of  the  great  Chris- 
tian commonwealth  of  which  England  had  till  now  formed 
a  part,  and  the  impossibility  of  any  real  exercise  of  a  spir- 
itual sovereignty  over  it  by  the  weakened  Papacy,  as  well 
as  by  outraging  the  national  pride  through  the  summons 
of  the  King  to  a  foreign  bar  and  the  submission  of  Eng- 
lish interests  to  the  will  of  a  foreign  Emperor. 

With  such  a  spur  as  this  the  movement  which  More 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461-1540.  161 

dreaded  moved  forward  as  quickly  as  Cromwell  desired. 
The  time  had  come  when  England  was  to  claim  for  her- 
self the  fulness  of  power,  ecclesiastical  as  well  as  temporal, 
within  her  bounds ;  and  in  the  concentration  of  all  author- 
ity within  the  hands  of  the  sovereign  which  was  the  polit- 
ical characteristic  of  the  time  to  claim  this  power  for  the 
nation  was  to  claim  it  for  the  King.  The  import  of  that 
headship  of  the  Church  which  Henry  had  assumed  in  the 
preceding  year  was  brought  fully  out  in  one  of  the  propo- 
sitions laid  before  the  Convocation  of  1532.  "  The  King's 
Majesty,"  runs  this  memorable  clause,  "hath  as  well  the 
care  of  the  souls  of  his  subjects  as  their  bodies ;  and  may 
by  the  law  of  God  by  his  Parliament  make  laws  touching 
and  concerning  as  well  the  one  as  the  other."  The  princi- 
ple embodied  in  these  words  was  carried  out  in  a  series  of 
decisive  measures.  Under  strong  pressure  the  Convoca- 
tion was  brought  to  pray  that  the  power  of  independent 
legislation  till  now  exercised  by  the  Church  should  come 
to  an  end,  and  to  promise  "  that  from  henceforth  we  shall 
forbear  to  enact,  promulge,  or  put  into  execution  any  such 
constitutions  and  ordinances  so  by  us  to  be  made  in  time 
coming,  unless  your  Highness  by  your  royal  assent  shall 
license  us  to  make,  promulge,  and  execute  them,  and  the 
same  so  made  be  approved  by  your  Highness'  authority." 
Rome  was  dealt  with  in  the  same  unsparing  fashion.  The 
Parliament  forbade  by  statute  any  further  appeals  to  the 
Papal  Court ;  and  on  a  petition  from  the  clergy  in  Convo- 
cation the  Houses  granted  power  to  the  King  to  suspend 
the  payments  of  first-fruits,  or  the  year's  revenue  which 
each  bishop  paid  to  Rome  on  his  election  to  a  see.  All 
judicial,  all  financial  connection  with  the  Papacy  was 
broken  by  these  two  measures.  The  last  indeed  was  as 
yet  but  a  menace  which  Henry  might  use  in  his  negotia- 
tions with  Clement.  The  hope  which  had  been  entertained 
of  aid  from  Charles  was  now  abandoned ;  and  the  overthrow 
of  Norfolk  and  his  policy  of  alliance  with  the  Empire  was 
•een  at  the  midsummer  of  1632  in  the  conclusion  of  a 


162  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

league  with  France.  Cromwell  had  fallen  back  on  Wol- 
sey's  system ;  and  the  divorce  was  now  to  be  looked  for 
from  the  united  pressure  of  the  French  and  English  Kings 
on  the  Papal  Court. 

But  the  pressure  was  as  unsuccessful  as  before.  In 
November  Clement  threatened  the  King  with  excommuni- 
cation if  he  did  not  restore  Catharine  to  her  place  as  Queen 
and  abstain  from  all  intercourse  with  Anne  Boleyn  till  the 
case  was  tried.  But  Henry  still  refused  to  submit  to  the 
judgment  of  any  court  outside  his  realm ;  and  the  Pope, 
ready  as  he  was  with  evasion  and  delay,  dared  not  alienate 
Charles  by  consenting  to  a  trial  within  it.  The  lavish 
pledges  which  Francis  had  given  in  an  interview  during 
the  preceding  summer  may  have  aided  to  spur  the  King 
to  a  decisive  step  which  closed  the  long  debate.  At  the 
opening  of  1533  Henry  was  privately  married  to  Anne 
Boleyn.  The  match  however  was  carefully  kept  secret 
while  the  Papal  sanction  was  being  gained  for  the  appoint- 
ment of  Cranmer  to  the  see  of  Canterbury,  which  had 
become  vacant  by  Archbishop  Warham's  death  in  the 
preceding  year.  But  Cranmer's  consecration  at  the  close 
of  March  was  the  signal  for  more  open  action,  and  Crom- 
well's policy  was  at  last  brought  fairly  into  play.  The 
new  primate  at  once  laid  the  question  of  the  King's  mar- 
riage before  the  two  Houses  of  Convocation,  and  both 
voted  that  the  license  of  Pope  Julius  had  been  beyond  the 
Papal  powers  and  that  the  marriage  which  it  authorized 
was  void.  In  May  the  King's  suit  was  brought  before 
the  Archbishop  in  his  court  at  Dunstable;  his  judgment 
annulled  the  marriage  with  Catharine  as  void  from  the 
beginning,  and  pronounced  the  marriage  with  Anne 
Boleyn,  which  her  pregnancy  had  forced  Henry  to  reveal, 
a  lawful  marriage.  A  week  later  the  hand  of  Cranmer 
placed  upon  Anne's  brow  the  crown  which  she  had  coveted 
so  long. 

"There  was  much  murmuring"  at  measures  such  as 
these.  Many  thought  "that  the  Bishop  of  Boss*  would 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONAECHY.     1461—1540.  163 

curse  all  Englishmen,  and  that  the  Emperor  and  he  would 
destroy  all  the  people."  Fears  of  the  overthrow  of  religion 
told  on  the  clergy ;  the  merchants  dreaded  an  interruption 
of  the  trade  with  Flanders,  Italy  and  Spain.  But 
Charles,  though  still  loyal  to  his  aunt's  cause,  had  no  mind 
to  incur  risks  for  her ;  and  Clement,  though  he  annulled 
Cranmer's  proceedings,  hesitated  as  yet  to  take  sterner 
action.  Henry,  on  the  other  hand,  conscious  that  the  die 
was  thrown,  moved  rapidly  forward  in  the  path  that 
Cromwell  had  opened.  The  Pope's  reversal  of  the  Pri- 
mate's judgment  was  answered  by  an  appeal  to  a  General 
Council.  The  decision  of  the  cardinals  to  whom  the  case 
was  referred  in  the  spring  of  1534,  a  decision  which  as- 
serted the  lawfulness  of  Catharine's  marriage,  was  met  by 
the  enforcement  of  the  long  suspended  statute  forbidding 
the  payment  of  first-fruits  to  the  Pope.  Though  the  King 
was  still  firm  in  his  resistance  to  Lutheran  opinions  and  at 
this  moment  endeavored  to  prevent  by  statute  the  importa- 
tion of  Lutheran  books,  the  less  scrupulous  hand  of  his 
minister  was  seen  already  striving  to  find  a  counterpoise 
to  the  hostility  of  the  Emperor  in  an  alliance  with  the 
Lutheran  princes  of  North  Germany.  Cromwell  was  now 
fast  rising  to  a  power  which  rivalled  Wolsey's.  His  ele- 
vation to  the  post  of  Lord  Privy  Seal  placed  him  on  a  level 
with  the  great  nobles  of  the  Council  board ;  and  Norfolk, 
constant  in  his  hopes  of  reconciliation  with  Charles  and 
the  Papacy,  saw  his  plans  set  aside  for  the  wider  and  more 
daring  projects  of  "the  blacksmith's  son."  Cromwell  still 
clung  to  the  political  engine  whose  powers  he  had  turned 
to  the  service  of  the  Crown.  The  Parliament  which  had 
been  summoned  at  Wolsey's  fall  met  steadily  year  after 
year;  and  measure  after  measure  had  shown  its  accord- 
ance with  the  royal  will  in  the  strife  with  Rome.  It  was 
now  called  to  deal  a  final  blow.  Step  by  step  the  ground 
had  been  cleared  for  the  great  Statute  by  which  the  new 
character  of  the  English  Church  was  defined  in  the  session 
of  1534.  By  the  Act  of  Supremacy  authority  in  all  mat- 


164  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

ters  ecclesiastical  was  vested  solely  in  the  Crown.  The 
courts  spiritual  became  as  thoroughly  the  King's  courts  as 
the  temporal  courts  at  Westminster.  The  Statute  ordered 
that  the  King  "  shall  be  taken,  accepted,  and  reputed  the 
only  supreme  head  on  earth  of  the  Church  of  England, 
and  shall  have  and  enjoy  annexed  and  united  to  the  Im- 
perial Crown  of  this  realm  as  well  the  title  and  state  there- 
of as  all  the  honors,  jurisdictions,  authorities,  immunities, 
profits,  and  commodities  to  the  said  dignity  belonging, 
with  full  power  to  visit,  repress,  redress,  reform,  and 
amend  all  such  errors,  heresies,  abuses,  contempts,  and 
enormities,  which  by  any  manner  of  spiritual  authority 
or  jurisdiction  might  or  may  lawfully  be  reformed. " 

The  full  import  of  the  Act  of  Supremacy  was  only  seen 
in  the  following  year.  At  the  opening  of  1535  Henry 
formally  took  the  title  of  "  on  earth  Supreme  Head  of  the 
Church  of  England,"  and  some  months  later  Cromwell 
was  raised  to  the  post  of  Vicar-General,  or  Vicegerent  of 
the  King  in  all  matters  ecclesiastical.  His  title,  like  his 
office,  recalled  the  system  of  Wolsey.  It  was  not  only  as 
Legate,  but  in  later  years  as  Vicar-general  of  the  Pope, 
that  Wolsey  had  brought  all  spiritual  causes  in  England 
to  an  English  court.  The  supreme  ecclesiastical  jurisdic- 
tion in  the  realm  passed  into  the  hands  of  a  minister  who 
as  Chancellor  already  exercised  its  supreme  civil  juris- 
diction. The  Papal  power  had  therefore  long  seemed 
transferred  to  the  Crown  before  the  legislative  measures 
which  followed  the  divorce  actually  transferred  it.  It  was 
\in  fact  the  system  of  Catholicism  itself  that  trained  men 
to  look  without  surprise  on  the  concentration  of  all  spirit- 
ual and  secular  authority  in  Cromwell.  Successor  to 
Wolsey  as  Keeper  of  the  Great  Seal,  it  seemed  natural 
enough  that  Cromwell  should  succeed  him  also  as  Vicar- 
General  of  the  Church  and  that  the  union  of  the  two 
powers  should  be  restored  in  the  hands  of  a  minister  of 
the  King.  But  the  mere  fact  that  these  powers  were 
united  in  the  hands  not  of  a  priest  but  of  a  layman  showed 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1540.  165 

the  new  drift  of  the  royal  policy.  The  Church  was  no 
longer  to  be  brought  indirectly  under  the  royal  power;  in 
the  policy  of  Cromwell  it  was  to  be  openly  laid  prostrate 
at  the  foot  of  the  throne. 

And  this  policy  his  position  enabled  him  to  carry  out 
with  a  terrible  thoroughness.  One  great  step  toward  its 
realization  had  already  been  taken  in  the  statute  which 
annihilated  the  free  legislative  powers  of  the  convocations 
of  the  Clergy.  Another  followed  in  an  act  which  under 
the  pretext  of  restoring  the  free  election  of  bishops  turned 
every  prelate  into  a  nominee  of  the  King.  The  election 
of  bishops  by  the  chapters  of  their  cathedral  churches  had 
long  become  formal,  and  their  appointment  had  since  the 
time  of  the  Edwards  been  practically  made  by  the  Papacy 
on  the  nomination  of  the  Crown.  The  privilege  of  free 
election  was  now  with  bitter  irony  restored  to  the  chapters, 
but  they  were  compelled  on  pain  of  pra3munire  to  choose 
whatever  candidate  was  recommended  by  the  King.  This 
strange  expedient  has  lasted  till  the  present  time,  though 
its  character  has  wholly  changed  with  the  development  of 
constitutional  rule.  The  nomination  of  bishops  has  ever 
since  the  accession  of  the  Georges  passed  from  the  King  in 
person  to  the  Minister  who  represents  the  will  of  the  peo- 
ple. Practically  therefore  an  English  prelate,  alone  among 
all  the  prelates  of  the  world,  is  now  raised  to  his  episcopal 
throne  by  the  same  popular  election  which  raised  Ambrose 
to  his  episcopal  chair  at  Milan.  But  at  the  moment  of  the 
change  Cromwell's  measure  reduced  the  English  bishops  to 
absolute  dependence  on  the  Crown.  Their  dependence 
would  have  been  complete  had  his  policy  been  thoroughly 
carried  out,  and  the  royal  power  of  deposition  put  in  force, 
as  well  as  that  of  appointment.  As  it  was  Henry  could 
warn  the  Archbishop  of  Dublin  that  if  he  persevered  in 
his  "  proud  folly,  we  be  able  to  remove  you  again  and  to 
put  another  man  of  more  virtue  and  honesty  in  your  place. " 
By  the  more  ardent  partisans  of  the  Reformation  this  de- 
pendence of  the  bishops  on  the  Crown  was  fully  recognized. 


166  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.        [BOOK  V. 

On  the  death  of  Henry  the  Eighth  Cranmer  took  out  a  new 
commission  from  Edward  for  the  exercise  of  his  office. 
Latimer,  when  the  royal  policy  clashed  with  his  belief, 
felt  bound  to  resign  the  See  of  Worcester.  If  the  power 
of  deposition  was  quietly  abandoned  by  Elizabeth,  the 
abandonment  was  due  not  so  much  to  any  deference  for 
the  religious  instincts  of  the  nation  as  to  the  fact  that  the 
steady  servility  of  the  bishops  rendered  its  exercise  unnec- 
essary. 

A  second  step  in  Cromwell's  policy  followed  hard  on 
this  enslavement  of  the  episcopate.  Master  of  Convocation, 
absolute  master  of  the  bishops,  Henry  had  become  master 
of  the  monastic  orders  through  the  right  of  visitation  over 
them  which  had  been  transferred  by  the  Act  of  Supremacy 
from  the  Papacy  to  the  Crown.  The  monks  were  soon  to 
know  what  this  right  of  visitation  implied  in  the  hands  of 
the  Vicar-General.  As  an  outlet  for  religious  enthusiasm, 
monasticism  was  practically  dead.  The  friar,  now  that 
his  fervor  of  devotion  and  his  intellectual  energy  had 
passed  away,  had  sunk  into  a  mere  beggar.  The  monks 
had  become  mere  landowners.  Most  of  the  religious 
houses  were  anxious  only  to  enlarge  their  revenues  and  to 
diminish  the  number  of  those  who  shared  them.  In  the 
general  carelessness  which  prevailed  as  to  the  spiritual 
objects  of  their  trust,  in  the  wasteful  management  of  their 
estates,  in  the  indolence  and  self-indulgence  which  for  the 
most  part  characterized  them,  the  monastic  establishments 
simply  exhibited  the  faults  of  all  corporate  bodies  that 
have  outlived  the  work  which  they  were  created  to  per- 
form. They  were  no  more  unpopular,  however,  than  such 
corporate  bodies  generally  are.  The  Lollard  cry  for  their 
suppression  had  died  away.  In  the  north,  where  some  of 
the  greatest  abbeys  were  situated,  the  monks  were  on  good 
terms  with  the  country  gentry  and  their  houses  served  as 
schools  for  their  children ;  nor  is  there  any  sign  of  a  differ- 
ent feeling  elsewhere. 

But  they  had  drawn  on  themselves  at  once  the  hatred  of 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1540.  167 

the  New  Learning  and  of  the  Monarchy.  In  the  early 
days  of  the  revival  of  letters  Popes  and  bishops  had  joined 
with  princes  and  scholars  in  welcoming  the  diffusion  of 
culture  and  the  hopes  of  religious  reform.  But  though  an 
abbot  or  a  prior  here  or  there  might  be  found  among  the 
supporters  of  the  movement,  the  monastic  orders  as  a 
whole  repelled  it  with  unswerving  obstinacy.  The  quarrel 
only  became  more  bitter  as  years  went  on.  The  keen  sar- 
casms of  Erasmus,  the  insolent  buffoonery  of  Hutten, 
were  lavished  on  the  "  lovers  of  darkness"  and  of  the  clois- 
ter. In  England  Colet  and  More  echoed  with  greater  re- 
serve the  scorn  and  invective  of  their  friends.  The  Mon- 
archy had  other  causes  for  its  hate.  In  Cromwell's  system 
there  was  no  room  for  either  the  virtues  or  the  vices  of 
monasticism,  for  its  indolence  and  superstition,  or  for  its 
independence  of  the  throne.  The  bold  stand  which  the 
monastic  orders  had  made  against  benevolences  had  never 
been  forgiven,  while  the  revenues  of  their  foundations 
offered  spoil  vast  enough  to  fill  the  royal  treasury  and 
secure  a  host  of  friends  for  the  new  reforms.  Two  royal 
commissioners  therefore  were  dispatched  on  a  general  vis- 
itation of  the  religious  houses,  and  their  reports  formed  a 
"  Black  Book"  which  was  laid  before  Parliament  in  1536. 
It  was  acknowledged  that  about  a  third  of  the  houses,  in- 
cluding the  bulk  of  the  larger  abbeys,  were  fairly  and  de- 
cently conducted.  The  rest  were  charged  with  drunken- 
ness, with  simony,  and  with  the  foulest  and  most  revolting 
crimes.  The  character  of  the  visitors,  the  sweeping 
nature  of  their  report,  and  the  long  debate  which  followed 
on  its  reception,  leaves  little  doubt  that  these  charges  were 
grossly  exaggerated.  But  the  want  of  any  effective  disci- 
pline which  had  resulted  from  their  exemption  from  all  but 
Papal  supervision  told  fatally  against  monastic  morality 
even  in  abbeys  like  St.  Alban's;  and  the  acknowledgment 
of  Warham,  as  well  as  a  partial  measure  of  suppression 
begun  by  Wolsey,  go  some  way  to  prove  that  in  the  smaller 
houses  at  least  indolence  had  passed  into  crime.  A  cry 

8..  VOL.  2 


168  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

of  "  Down  with  them"  broke  from  the  Commons  as  the 
report  was  read.  The  country,  however,  was  still  far  from 
desiring  the  utter  downfall  of  the  monastic  system,  and  a 
long  and  bitter  debate  was  followed  by  a  compromise 
which  suppressed  all  houses  whose  income  fell  below  £2*0 
a  year.  Of  the  thousand  religious  houses  which  then  ex- 
isted in  England  nearly  four  hundred  were  dissolved  under 
this  Act  and  their  revenues  granted  to  the  Crown. 

The  secular  clergy  alone  remained ;  and  injunction  after 
injunction  from  the  Vicar-General  taught  rector  and  vicar 
that  they  must  learn  to  regard  themselves  as  mere  mouth- 
pieces of  the  royal  will.  The  Church  was  gagged.  With 
the  instinct  of  genius  Cromwell  discerned  the  part  which 
the  pulpit,  as  the  one  means  which  then  existed  of  speak- 
ing to  the  people  at  large,  was  to  play  in  the  religious  and 
political  struggle  that  was  at  hand;  and  he  resolved  to 
turn  it  to  the  profit  of  the  Monarchy.  The  restriction  of 
the  right  of  preaching  to  priests  who  received  licenses 
from  the  Crown  silenced  every  voice  of  opposition.  Even 
to  those  who  received  these  licenses  theological  controversy 
was  forbidden ;  and  a  high-handed  process  of  "  tuning  the 
pulpits"  by  express  directions  as  to  the  subject  and  tenor 
of  each  special  discourse  made  the  preachers  at  every 
crisis  mere  means  of  diffusing  the  royal  will.  As  a  first 
step  in  this  process  every  bishop,  abbot,  and  parish  priest, 
was  required  by  the  new  Vicar-General  to  preach  against 
the  usurpation  of  the  Papacy  and  to  proclaim  the  king  as 
supreme  Head  of  the  Church  on  earth.  The  very  topics 
of  the  sermon  were  carefully  prescribed ;  the  bishops  were 
held  responsible  for  the  compliance  of  the  clergy  with 
these  orders ;  and  the  sheriffs  were  held  responsible  for  the 
obedience  of  the  bishops. 

While  the  great  revolution  which  struck  down  the 
Church  was  in  progress  England  looked  silently  on.  In 
all  the  earlier  ecclesiastical  changes,  in  the  contest  over 
the  Papal  jurisdiction  and  Papal  exactions,  in  the  reform 
of  the  Church  courts,  even  in  the  curtailment  of  the  legis- 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  169 

lative  independence  of  the  clergy,  the  nation  as  a  whole 
had  gone  with  the  King.  But  from  the  enslavement  of 
the  priesthood,  from  the  gagging  of  the  pulpits,  from  the 
suppression  of  the  monasteries,  the  bulk  of  the  nation 
stood  aloof.  There  were  few  voices  indeed  of  protest.  As 
the  royal  policy  disclosed  itself,  as  the  Monarchy  trampled 
under  foot  the  tradition  and  reverence  of  ages  gone  by,  as 
its  figure  rose  bare  and  terrible  out  of  the  wreck  of  old  in- 
stitutions, England  simply  held  her  breath.  It  is  only 
through  the  stray  depositions  of  royal  spies  that  we  catch 
a  glimpse  of  the  wrath  and  hate  which  lay  seething  under 
this  silence  of  the  people.  For  the  silence  was  a  silence  of 
terror.  Before  Cromwell's  rise  and  after  his  fall  from 
power  the  reign  of  Henry  the  Eighth  witnessed  no  more 
than  the  common  tyranny  and  bloodshed  of  the  time.  But 
the  years  of  Cromwell's  administration  form  the  one 
period  in  our  history  which  deserves  the  name  that  men 
have  given  to  the  rule  of  Robespierre.  It  was  the  English 
Terror.  It  was  by  terror  that  Cromwell  mastered  the 
King.  Cranmer  could  plead  for  him  at  a  later  time  with 
Henry  as  "  one  whose  surety  was  only  by  your  Majesty, 
who  loved  your  Majesty,  as  I  ever  thought,  no  less  than 
God."  But  the  attitude  of  Cromwell  toward  the  King 
was  something  more  than  that  of  absolute  dependence  and 
unquestioning  devotion.  He  was  "  so  vigilant  to  preserve 
your  Majesty  from  all  treasons,"  adds  the  Primate,  "that 
few  could  be  so  secretly  conceived  but  he  detected  the  same 
from  the  beginning."  Henry,  like  every  Tudor,  was  fear- 
less of  open  danger,  but  tremulously  sensitive  to  the 
lightest  breath  of  hidden  disloyalty ;  and  it  was  on  this 
dread  that  Cromwell  based  the  fabric  of  his  power.  He 
was  hardly  secretary  before  spies  were  scattered  broadcast 
over  the  land.  Secret  denunciations  poured  into  the  open 
ear  of  the  minister.  The  air  was  thick  with  tales  of  plots 
and  conspiracies,  and  with  the  detection  and  suppression 
of  each  Cromwell  tightened  his  hold  on  the  King. 

As  it  was  by  terror  that  he  mastered  the  King,  so  it  was 


170  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

by  terror  that  he  mastered  the  people.  Men  felt  in  Eng- 
land, to  use  the  figure  by  which  Erasmus  paints  the  time, 
"as  if  a  scorpion  lay  sleeping  under  every  stone."  The 
confessional  had  no  secrets  for  Cromwell.  Men's  talk 
with  their  closest  friends  found  its  way  to  his  ear. 
"Words  idly  spoken,"  the  murmurs  of  a  petulant  abbot, 
the  ravings  of  a  moon-struck  nun,  were,  as  the  nobles 
cried  passionately  at  his  fall,  "tortured  into  treason." 
The  only  chance  of  safety  lay  in  silence.  "  Friends  who 
used  to  write  and  send  me  presents,"  Erasmus  tells  us, 
"  now  send  neither  letter  nor  gifts,  nor  receive  any  from 
any  one,  and  this  through  fear."  But  even  the  refuge  of 
silence  was  closed  by  a  law  more  infamous  than  any  that 
has  ever  blotted  the  Statute-book  of  England.  Not  only 
was  thought  made  treason,  but  men  were  forced  to  reveal 
their  thoughts  on  pain  of  their  very  silence  being  punished 
with  the  penalties  of  treason.  All  trust  in  the  older  bul- 
warks of  liberty  was  destroyed  by  a  policy  as  daring  as  it 
was  unscrupulous.  The  noblest  institutions  were  degraded 
into  instruments  of  terror.  Though  Wolsey  had  strained 
the  law  to  the  utmost  he  had  made  no  open  attack  on  the 
freedom  of  justice.  If  he  shrank  from  assembling  Parlia- 
ments it  was  from  his  sense  that  they  were  the  bulwarks 
of  liberty.  But  under  Cromwell  the  coercion  of  juries  and 
the  management  of  judges  rendered  the  courts  mere  mouth- 
pieces of  the  royal  will :  and  where  even  this  shadow  of 
justice  proved  an  obstacle  to  bloodshed,  Parliament  was 
brought  into  play  to  pass  bill  after  bill  of  attainder.  "  He 
shall  be  judged  by  the  bloody  laws  he  has  himself  made," 
was  the  cry  of  the  Council  at  the  moment  of  his  fall,  and 
by  a  singular  retribution  the  crowning  injustice  which  he 
sought  to  introduce  even  into  the  practice  of  attainder, 
the  condemnation  of  a  man  without  hearing  his  defence, 
was  only  practised  on  himself. 

But  ruthless  as  was  the  Terror  of  Cromwell  it  was  of  a 
nobler  type  than  the  Terror  of  France.  He  never  struck 
uselessly  or  capriciously,  or  stooped  to  the  meaner  victims 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  171 

of  the  guillotine.  His  blows  were  effective  just  because 
he  chose  his  victims  from  among  the  noblest  and  the  best. 
If  he  struck  at  the  Church,  it  was  through  the  Carthu- 
sians, the  holiest  and  the  most  renowned  of  English 
Churchmen.  If  he  struck  at  the  baronage,  it  was  through 
Lady  Salisbury,  in  whose  veins  flowed  the  blood  of  kings. 
If  he  struck  at  the  New  Learning,  it  was  through  the 
murder  of  Sir  Thomas  More.  But  no  personal  vindictive- 
ness  mingled  with  his  crime.  In  temper  indeed,  so  far  as 
we  can  judge  from  the  few  stories  which  lingered  among 
his  friends,  he  was  a  generous,  kindly-hearted  man,  with 
pleasant  and  winning  manners  which  atoned  for  a  certain 
awkwardness  of  person,  and  with  a  constancy  of  friend- 
ship which  won  him  a  host  of  devoted  adherents.  But  no 
touch  either  of  love  or  hate  swayed  him  from  his  course. 
The  student  of  Machiavelli  had  not  studied  the  "  Prince" 
in  vain.  He  had  reduced  bloodshed  to  a  system.  Frag- 
ments of  his  papers  still  show  us  with  what  a  business- 
like brevity  he  ticked  off  human  lives  among  the  casual 
"  remembrances"  of  the  day.  "  Item,  the  Abbot  of  Read- 
ing to  be  sent  down  to  be  tried  and  executed  at  Reading." 
"Item,  to  know  the  King's  pleasure  touching  Master 
More."  "  Item,  when  Master  Fisher  shall  go  to  his  execu- 
tion, and  the  other."  It  is  indeed  this  utter  absence  of  all 
passion,  of  all  personal  feeling,  that  makes  the  figure  of 
Cromwell  the  most  terrible  in  our  history.  He  has  an  ab- 
solute faith  in  the  end  he  is  pursuing,  and  he  simply  hews 
his  way  to  it  as  a  woodman  hews  his  way  through  the 
forest,  axe  in  hand. 

The  choice  of  his  first  victim  showed  the  ruthless  preci- 
sion with  which  Cromwell  was  to  strike.  In  the  general 
opinion  of  Europe  the  foremost  Englishman  of  the  time 
was  Sir  Thomas  More.  As  the  policy  of  the  divorce  ended 
in  an  open  rupture  with  Rome  he  had  withdrawn  silently 
from  the  ministry,  but  his  silent  disapproval  of  the  new 
policy  was  more  telling  than  the  opposition  of  obscurer 
foes.  To  Cromwell  there  must  have  been  something  spe- 


172  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [Boos  V. 

cially  galling  in  More's  attitude  of  reserve.  The  religious 
reforms  of  the  New  Learning  were  being  rapidly  carried 
out,  but  it  was  plain  that  the  man  who  represented  the 
very  life  of  the  New  Learning  believed  that  the  sacrifice 
of  liberty  and  justice  was  too  dear  a  price  to  pay  even  for 
religious  reform.  In  the  actual  changes  which  the  divorce 
brought  about  there  was  nothing  to  move  More  to  active 
or  open  opposition.  Though  he  looked  on  the  divorce  and 
re-marriage  as  without  religious  warrant,  he  found  no 
difficulty  in  accepting  an  Act  of  Succession  passed  in  1534 
which  declared  the  marriage  of  Anne  Boleyn  valid, 
annulled  the  title  of  Catharine's  child,  Mary,  and  declared 
the  children  of  Anne  the  only  lawful  heirs  to  the  crown. 
His  faith  in  the  power  of  Parliament  over  all  civil  matters 
was  too  complete  to  admit  a  doubt  of  its  competence  to 
regulate  the  succession  to  the  throne.  But  by  the  same 
Act  an  oath  recognizing  the  succession  as  then  arranged 
was  ordered  to  be  taken  by  all  persons ;  and  this  oath  con- 
tained an  acknowledgment  that  the  marriage  with  Catha- 
rine was  against  Scripture  and  invalid  from  the  begin- 
ning. Henry  had  long  known  More's  belief  on  this  point ; 
and  the  summons  to  take  this  oath  was  simply  a  summons 
to  death.  More  was  at  his  house  at  Chelsea  when  the 
summons  called  him  to  Lambeth,  to  the  house  where  he 
had  bandied  fun  with  Warham  and  Erasmus  or  bent  over 
the  easel  of  Holbein.  For  a  moment  there  may  have  been 
some  passing  impulse  to  yield.  But  it  was  soon  over. 
Triumphant  in  all  else,  the  monarchy  was  to  find  its  power 
stop  short  at  the  conscience  of  man.  The  great  battle  of 
spiritual  freedom,  the  battle  of  the  Protestant  against 
Mary,  of  the  Catholic  against  Elizabeth,  of  the  Puritan 
against  Charles,  of  the  Independent  against  the  Presby- 
terian, began  at  the  moment  when  More  refused  to  bend 
or  to  deny  his  convictions  at  a  king's  bidding. 

"I  thank  the  Lord,"  More  said  with  a  sudden  start  as 
the  boat  dropped  silently  down  the  river  from  his  garden 
steps  in  the  early  morning,  "  I  thank  the  Lord  that  the 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  173 

field  is  won."  At  Lambeth  Cranmer  and  his  fellow  com- 
missioners tendered  to  him  the  new  oath  of  allegiance; 
but,  as  they  expected,  it  was  refused.  They  bade  him 
walk  in  the  garden  that  he  might  reconsider  his  reply. 
The  day  was  hot  and  More  seated  himself  in  a  window 
from  which  he  could  look  down  into  the  crowded  court. 
Even  in  the  presence  of  death  the  quick  sympathy  of  his 
nature  could  enjoy  the  humor  and  life  of  the  throng  below. 
"I  saw,"  he  said  afterward,  "Master  Latimer  very  merry 
in  the  court,  for  he  laughed  and  took  one  or  twain  by  the 
neck  so  handsomely  that  if  they  had  been  women  I  should 
have  weened  that  he  waxed  wanton."  The  crowd  below 
was  chiefly  of  priests,  rectors,  and  vicars,  pressing  to  take 
the  oath  that  More  found  harder  than  death.  He  bore 
them  no  grudge  for  it.  When  he  heard  the  voice  of  one 
who  was  known  to  have  boggled  hard  at  the  oath  a  little 
while  before  calling  loudly  and  ostentatiously  for  drink, 
he  only  noted  him  with  his  peculiar  humor.  "  He  drank," 
More  supposed,  "  either  from  dryness  or  from  gladness"  or 
"  to  show  quod  ille  notus  erat  Pontifici."  He  was  called 
in  again  at  last,  but  only  repeated  his  refusal.  It  was  in 
vain  that  Cranmer  plied  him  with  distinctions  which  per- 
plexed even  the  subtle  wit  of  the  ex-chancellor ;  More  re- 
mained unshaken  and  passed  to  the  Tower.  He  was  fol- 
lowed there  by  Bishop  Fisher  of  Rochester,  the  most  aged 
and  venerable  of  the  English  prelates,  who  was  charged 
with  countenancing  treason  by  listening  to  the  prophecies 
of  a  religious  fanatic  called  "  The  Nun  of  Kent."  But  for 
the  moment  even  Cromwell  shrank  from  their  blood. 
They  remained  prisoners  while  a  new  and  more  terrible 
engine  was  devised  to  crush  out  the  silent  but  widespread 
opposition  to  the  religious  changes. 

By  a  statute  passed  at  the  close  of  1534  a  new  treason 
was  created  in  the  denial  of  the  King's  titles ;  and  in  the 
opening  of  1535  Henry  assumed  as  we  have  seen  the  title 
of  "on  earth  supreme  head  of  the  Church  of  England." 
The  measure  was  at  once  followed  up  by  a  blow  at  victims 


174  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

hardly  less  venerable  than  More.  In  the  general  relaxa- 
tion of  the  religious  life  the  charity  and  devotion  of  the 
brethren  of  the  Charter-house  had  won  the  reverence  even 
of  those  who  condemned  monasticism.  After  a  stubborn 
resistance  they  had  acknowledged  the  royal  Supremacy 
and  taken  the  oath  of  submission  prescribed  by  the  Act. 
But  by  an  infamous  construction  of  the  statute  which 
made  the  denial  of  the  Supremacy  treason,  the  refusal  of 
satisfactory  answers  to  official  questions  as  to  a  conscien- 
tious belief  in  it  was  held  to  be  equivalent  to  open  deniaL 
The  aim  of  the  new  measure  was  well  known,  and  the 
brethren  prepared  to  die.  In  the  agony  of  waiting  enthu- 
siasm brought  its  imaginative  consolations;  "when  the 
Host  was  lifted  up  there  came  as  it  were  a  whisper  of  air 
which  breathed  upon  our  faces  as  we  knelt;  and  there 
came  a  sweet  soft  sound  of  music."  They  had  not  long 
however  to  wait,  for  their  refusal  to  answer  was  the  sig- 
nal for  their  doom.  Three  of  the  brethren  went  to  the 
gallows;  the  rest  were  flung  into  Newgate,  chained  to 
posts  in  a  noisome  dungeon  where,  "  tied  and  not  able  to 
stir,"  they  were  left  to  perish  of  jail-fever  and  starvation. 
In  a  fortnight  five  were  dead  and  the  rest  at  the  point  of 
death,  "almost  dispatched,"  Cromwell's  envoy  wrote  to 
him,  "by  the  hand  of  God,  of  which,  considering  their 
behavior,  I  am  not  sorry."  Their  death  was  soon  followed 
by  that  of  More.  The  interval  of  imprisonment  had  failed 
to  break  his  resolution,  and  the  new  statute  sufficed  to 
bring  him  to  the  block.  With  Fisher  he  was  convicted  of 
denying  the  king's  title  as  only  supreme  head  of  the 
Church.  The  old  Bishop  approached  the  scaffold  with 
a  book  of  the  New  Testament  in  his  hand.  He  opened 
it  at  a  venture  ere  he  knelt,  and  read,  "This  is  life 
eternal  to  know  Thee,  the  only  true  God."  In  July 
More  followed  his  fellow-prisoner  to  the  block.  On 
the  eve  of  the  fatal  blow  he  moved  his  beard  care- 
fully from  the  reach  of  the  doomsman's  axe.  "Pity 
that  should  be  cut,"  he  was  heard  to  mutter  with  a 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  175 

touch  of  the  old  sad  irony,  "that  has  never  committed 
treason." 

Cromwell  had  at  last  reached  his  aim.  England  lay 
panic-stricken  at  the  feet  of  the  "low-born  knave,"  as  the 
nobles  called  him,  who  represented  the  omnipotence  of  the 
crown.  Like  Wolsey  he  concentrated  in  his  hands  the 
whole  administration  of  the  state ;  he  was  at  once  foreign 
minister  and  home  minister,  and  vicar-general  of  the 
Church,  the  creator  of  a  new  fleet,  the  organizer  of  armies, 
the  president  of  the  terrible  Star  Chamber.  His  Italian 
indifference  to  the  mere  show  of  power  stood  out  in  strong 
contrast  with  the  pomp  of  the  Cardinal.  Cromwell's  per- 
sonal habits  were  simple  and  unostentatious ;  if  he  clutched 
at  money,  it  was  to  feed  the  army  of  spies  whom  he  main- 
tained at  his  own  expense,  and  whose  work  he  surveyed 
with  a  ceaseless  vigilance.  For  his  activity  was  bound- 
less. More  than  fifty  volumes  remain  of  the  gigantic  mass 
of  his  correspondence.  Thousands  of  letters  from  "poor 
bedesmen,"  from  outraged  wives  and  wronged  laborers  and 
persecuted  heretics  flowed  in  to  the  all-powerful  minister 
whose  system  of  personal  government  turned  him  into  the 
universal  court  of  appeal.  But  powerful  as  he  was,  and 
mighty  as  was  the  work  which  he  had  accomplished,  he 
knew  that  harder  blows  had  to  be  struck  before  his  posi- 
tion was  secure.  The  new  changes,  above  all  the  irrita- 
tion which  had  been  caused  by  the  outrages  with  which 
the  dissolution  of  the  monasteries  was  accompanied,  gave 
point  to  the  mutinous  temper  that  prevailed  throughout 
the  country;  for  the  revolution  in  agriculture  was  still 
going  on,  and  evictions  furnished  embittered  outcasts  to 
swell  the  ranks  of  any  rising.  Nor  did  it  seem  as  though 
revolt,  if  it  once  broke  out,  would  want  leaders  to  head  it. 
The  nobles  who  had  writhed  under  the  rule  of  the  Cardinal, 
writhed  yet  more  bitterly  under  the  rule  of  one  whom  they 
looked  upon  not  only  as  Wolsey's  tool,  but  as  a  low-born 
upstart.  "  The  world  will  never  mend,"  Lord  Hussey  had 
been  heard  to  say,  "till  we  fight  for  it."  "Knaves  rule 


176  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

about  the  king !"  cried  Lord  Exeter,  "  I  trust  some  day  to 
give  them  a  buffet !"  At  this  moment  too  the  hopes  of 
political  reaction  were  stirred  by  the  fate  of  one  whom  the 
friends  of  the  old  order  looked  upon  as  the  source  of  all 
their  troubles.  In  the  spring  of  1536,  while  the  dissolu- 
tion of  the  monasteries  was  marking  the  triumph  of  the 
new  policy,  Anne  Boleyn  was  suddenly  charged  with 
adultery,  and  sent  to  the  Tower.  A  few  days  later  she 
was  tried,  condemned,  and  brought  to  the  block.  The 
Queen's  ruin  was  everywhere  taken  as  an  omen  of  ruin  to 
the  cause  which  had  become  identified  with  her  own,  and 
the  old  nobility  mustered  courage  to  face  the  minister  who 
held  them  at  his  feet. 

They  found  their  opportunity  in  the  discontent  of  the 
north,  where  the  monasteries  had  been  popular,  and  where 
the  rougher  mood  of  the  people  turned  easily  to  resistance. 
In  the  autumn  of  1536  a  rising  broke  out  in  Lincolnshire, 
and  this  was  hardly  quelled  when  all  Yorkshire  rose  in 
arms.  From  every  parish  the  farmers  marched  with  the 
parish  priest  at  their  head  upon  York,  and  the  surrender 
of  this  city  determined  the  waverers.  In  a  few  days  Skip- 
ton  Castle,  where  the  Earl  of  Cumberland  held  out  with  a 
handful  of  men,  was  the  only  spot  north  of  the  Humber 
which  remained  true  to  the  King.  Durham  rose  at  the 
call  of  the  chiefs  of  the  house  of  Neville,  Lords  Westmore- 
land and  Latimer.  Though  the  Earl  of  Northumberland 
feigned  sickness,  the  Percies  joined  the  revolt.  Lord 
Dacre,  the  chief  of  the  Yorkshire  nobles,  surrendered 
Pomfret,  and  was  acknowledged  as  their  chief  by  the  in- 
surgents. The  whole  nobility  of  the  north  were  now  ea- 
listed  in  the  "Pilgrimage  of  Grace,"  as  the  rising  called 
itself,  and  thirty  thousand  "tall  men  and  well  horsed" 
moved  on  the  Don  demanding  the  reversal  of  tke  royal 
policy,  a  reunion  with  Rome,  the  restoration  of  Catharine's 
daughter,  Mary,  to  her  rights  as  heiress  of  the  Crown,  re- 
dress for  the  wrongs  done  to  the  Church,  and  above  all  the 
driving  away  of  base-born  councillors,  or  in  other  words, 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  177 

the  fall  of  Cromwell.  Though  their  advance  was  checked 
by  negotiation,  the  organization  of  the  revolt  went  steadily 
on  throughout  the  winter,  and  a  Parliament  of  the  North 
which  gathered  at  Pomfret  formally  adopted  the  demands 
of  the  insurgents.  Only  six  thousand  men  under  Norfolk 
barred  their  way  southward,  and  the  Midland  counties 
were  known  to  be  disaffected. 

But  Cromwell  remained  undaunted  by  the  peril.  He 
suffered  indeed  Norfolk  to  negotiate ;  and  allowed  Henry 
under  pressure  from  his  Council  to  promise  pardon  and  a 
free  Parliament  at  York,  a  pledge  which  Norfolk  and 
Dacre  alike  construed  into  an  acceptance  of  the  demands 
made  by  the  insurgents.  Their  leaders  at  once  flung  aside 
the  badge  of  the  Five  Wounds  which  they  had  worn  with 
a  cry,  "  We  will  wear  no  badge  but  that  of  our  Lord  the 
King,"  and  nobles  and  farmers  dispersed  to  their  homes 
in  triumph.  But  the  towns  of  the  North  were  no  sooner 
garrisoned  and  Norfolk's  army  in  the  heart  of  Yorkshire 
than  the  veil  was  flung  aside.  A  few  isolated  outbreaks 
in  the  spring  of  1537  gave  a  pretext  for  the  withdrawal  of 
every  concession.  The  arrest  of  the  leaders  of  the  "  Pil- 
grimage of  Grace"  was  followed  by  ruthless  severities. 
The  country  was  covered  with  gibbets.  Whole  districts 
were  given  up  to  military  execution.  But  it  was  on  the 
leaders  of  the  rising  that  Cromwell's  hand  fell  heaviest. 
He  seized  his  opportunity  for  dealing  at  the  northern  no- 
bles a  fatal  blow.  "Cromwell,"  one  of  the  chief  among 
them  broke  fiercely  out  as  he  stood  at  the  Council  board, 
"  it  is  thou  that  art  the  very  special  and  chief  cause  of  all 
this  rebellion  and  wickedness,  and  dost  daily  travail  to 
bring  us  to  our  ends  and  strike  off  our  heads.  I  trust  that 
ere  thou  die,  though  thou  wouldst  procure  all  the  noblest 
heads  within  the  realm  to  be  stricken  off,  yet  there  shall 
one  head  remain  that  shall  strike  off  thy  head."  But  the 
warning  was  unheeded.  Lord  Darcy,  who  stood  first 
among  the  nobles  of  Yorkshire,  and  Lord  Hussey,  who 
stood  first  among  the  nobles  of  Lincolnshire,  went  alike  to 


178  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

the  block.  The  Abbot  of  Barlings,  who  had  ridden  into 
Lincoln  with  his  canons  in  full  armor,  swung  with  his 
brother  Abbots  of  Whalley,  Woburn,  and  Sawley  from  the 
gallows.  The  Abbots  of  Fountains  and  of  Jervaulx  were 
hanged  at  Tyburn  side  by  side  with  the  representative  of 
the  great  line  of  Percy.  Lady  Bulmer  was  burned  at  the 
stake.  Sir  Robert  Constable  was  hanged  in  chains  before 
the  gate  of  Hull. 

The  defeat  of  the  northern  revolt  showed  the  immense 
force  which  the  monarchy  had  gained.  Even  among  the 
rebels  themselves  not  a  voice  had  threatened  Henry's 
throne.  It  was  not  at  the  King  that  they  aimed  these 
blows,  but  at  the  "  low-born  knaves"  who  stood  about  the 
King.  At  this  moment  too  Henry's  position  was  strength- 
ened by  the  birth  of  an  heir.  On  the  death  of  Anne 
Boleyn  he  had  married  Jane  Seymour,  the  daughter  of  a 
Wiltshire  knight;  and  in  1537  this  Queen  died  in  giving 
birth  to  a  boy,  the  future  Edward  the  Sixth.  The  triumph 
of  the  Crown  at  home  was  doubled  by  its  triumph  in  the 
great  dependency  which  had  so  long  held  the  English 
authority  at  bay,  across  St.  George's  Channel.  Though 
Henry  the  Seventh  had  begun  the  work  of  bridling  Ireland 
he  had  no  strength  for  exacting  a  real  submission;  and 
the  great  Norman  lords  of  the  Pale,  the  Butlers  and  Geral- 
dines,  the  De  la  Poers  and  the  Fitzpatricks,  though  sub- 
jects in  name,  remained  in  fact  defiant  of  the  royal  au- 
thority. In  manners  and  outer  seeming  they  had  sunk 
into  mere  natives;  their  feuds  were  as  incessant  as  those 
of  the  Irish  septs;  and  their  despotism  combined  the  hor- 
rors of  feudal  oppression  with  those  of  Celtic  anarchy. 
Crushed  by  taxation,  by  oppression,  by  misgovernment, 
plundered  alike  by  native  marauders  and  by  the  troops 
levied  to  disperse  them,  the  wretched  descendants  of  the 
first  English  settlers  preferred  even  Irish  misrule  to  Eng- 
lish "order,"  and  the  border  of  the  Pale  retreated  steadily 
toward  Dublin.  The  towns  of  the  seaboard,  sheltered  by 
their  walls  and  their  municipal  self-government,  formed 


CHAP.  4,]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461-1540.  179 

the  only  exceptions  to  the  general  chaos ;  elsewhere  through- 
out its  dominions  the  English  Government,  though  still 
strong  enough  to  break  down  any  open  revolt,  was  a  mere 
phantom  of  rule.  From  the  Celtic  tribes  without  the  Pale 
even  the  remnant  of  civilization  and  of  native  union  which 
had  lingered  on  to  the  time  of  Strongbow  had  vanished 
away.  The  feuds  of  the  Irish  septs  were  as  bitter  as  their 
hatred  of  the  stranger;  and  the  Government  at  Dublin 
found  it  easy  to  maintain  a  strife  which  saved  it  the  neces- 
sity of  self-defence  among  a  people  whose  "nature  is  such 
that  for  money  one  shall  have  the  son  to  war  against  the 
father,  and  the  father  against  his  child."  During  the  first 
thirty  years  of  the  sixteenth  century  the  annals  of  the 
country  which  remained  under  native  rule  record  more 
than  a  hundred  raids  and  battles  between  clans  of  the 
north  alone. 

But  the  time  came  at  last  for  a  vigorous  attempt  on  the 
part  of  England  to  introduce  order  into  this  chaos  of  tur- 
bulence and  misrule.  To  Henry  the  Eighth  the  policy  of 
forbearance,  of  ruling  Ireland  through  the  great  Irish  lords, 
was  utterly  hateful.  His  purpose  was  to  rule  in  Ireland 
as  thoroughly  and  effectively  as  he  ruled  in  England,  and 
during  the  latter  half  of  his  reign  he  bent  his  whole  ener- 
gies to  accomplish  this  aim.  From  the  first  hour  of  his 
accession  indeed  the  Irish  lords  felt  the  heavier  hand  of  a 
master.  The  Geraldines,  who  had  been  suffered  under 
the  preceding  reign  to  govern  Ireland  in  the  name  of  the 
Crown,  were  quick  to  discover  that  the  Crown  would  no 
longer  stoop  to  be  their  tool.  Their  head,  the  Earl  of  Kil- 
dare,  was  called  to  England  and  thrown  into  the  Tower. 
The  great  house  resolved  to  frighten  England  again  into  a 
conviction  of  its  helplessness;  and  a  rising  of  Lord  Thomas 
Fitzgerald  in  1534  followed  the  usual  fashion  of  Irish  re- 
volte.  A  murder  of  the  Archbishop  of  Dublin,  a  capture 
of  the  city,  a  repulse  before  its  castle,  a  harrying  of  the 
Pale,  ended  in  a  sudden  disappearance  of  the  rebels  among 
the  bogs  and  forests  of  the  feprdgr  on  the  advance  of  the 


180  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

English  forces.  It  had  been  usual  to  meet  such  an  onset 
as  this  by  a  raid  of  the  same  character,  by  a  corresponding 
failure  before  the  castle  of  the  rebellious  noble,  and  a  re- 
treat like  his  own  which  served  as  a  preliminary  to  negotia- 
tions and  a  compromise.  Unluckily  for  the  Fitzgeralds 
Henry  resolved  to  take  Ireland  seriously  in  hand,  and  he 
had  Cromwell  to  execute  his  will.  Skeffington,  a  new 
Lord  Deputy  who  was  sent  over  in  1535,  brought  with 
him  a  train  of  artillery  which  worked  a  startling  change 
in  the  political  aspect  of  the  island.  The  castles  that  had 
hitherto  sheltered  rebellion  were  battered  into  ruins. 
Maynooth,  a  stronghold  from  which  the  Geraldines  threat- 
ened Dublin  and  ruled  the  Pale  at  their  will,  was  beaten 
down  in  a  fortnight.  So  crushing  and  unforeseen  was  the 
blow  that  resistance  was  at  once  at  an  end.  Not  only  was 
the  power  of  the  great  Norman  house  which  had  towered 
over  Ireland  utterly  broken,  but  only  a  single  boy  was  left 
to  preserve  its  name. 

With  the  fall  of  the  Fitzgeralds  Ireland  felt  itself  in  a 
master's  grasp.  "Irishmen,"  wrote  one  of  the  Lord  Jus- 
tices to  Cromwell,  "  were  never  in  such  fear  as  now.  The 
King's  sessions  are  being  kept  in  five  shires  more  than 
formerly."  Not  only  were  the  Englishmen  of  the  Pale  at 
Henry's  feet  but  the  kerns  of  Wicklow  and  Wexford  sent 
in  their  submission;  and  for  the  first  time  in  men's  mem- 
ory an  English  army  appeared  in  Munster  and  reduced 
the  south  to  obedience.  The  border  of  the  Pale  was 
crossed,  and  the  wide  territory  where  the  Celtic  tribes  had 
preserved  their  independence  since  the  days  of  the  An- 
gevins  was  trampled  into  subjection.  A  castle  of  the 
O'Briens  which  guarded  the  passage  of  the  Shannon  was 
taken  by  assault,  and  its  fall  carried  with  it  the  submis- 
sion of  Clare.  The  capture  of  Athlone  brought  about  the 
reduction  of  Connaught,  and  assured  the  loyalty  of  the 
great  Norman  house  of  the  De  Burghs  or  Bourkes  who 
had  assumed  an  almost  royal  authority  in  the  west.  The 
resistance  of  the  tribes  of  the  north  was  broken  in  a  vie- 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  181 

tory  at  Bellahoe.  In  seven  years,  partly  through  the  vigor 
of  Skeffington's  successor,  Lord  Leonard  Grey,  and  still 
more  through  the  resolute  will  of  Henry  and  Cromwell, 
the  power  of  the  Crown,  which  had  been  limited  to  the 
walls  of  Dublin,  was  acknowledged  over  the  length  and 
breadth  of  the  land. 

But  submission  was  far  from  being  all  that  Henry  de- 
sired. His  aim  was  to  civilize  the  people  whom  he  had 
conquered — to  rule  not  by  force  but  by  law.  But  the  only 
conception  of  law  which  the  King  or  his  ministers  could 
frame  was  that  of  English  law.  The  customary  law  which 
prevailed  without  the  Pale,  the  native  system  of  clan  gov- 
ernment and  common  tenure  of  land  by  the  tribe,  as  well 
as  the  poetry  and  literature  which  threw  their  lustre  over 
the  Irish  tongue,  were  either  unknown  to  the  English 
statesmen  or  despised  by  them  as  barbarous.  The  one 
mode  of  civilizing  Ireland  and  redressing  its  chaotic  mis- 
rule which  presented  itself  to  their  minds  was  that  of  de- 
stroying the  whole  Celtic  tradition  of  the  Irish  people — 
that  of  "  making  Ireland  English"  in  manners,  in  law,  and 
in  tongue.  The  Deputy,  Parliament,  Judges,  Sheriffs, 
which  already  existed  within  the  Pale,  furnished  a  faint 
copy  of  English  institutions ;  and  it  was  hoped  that  these 
might  be  gradually  extended  over  the  whole  island.  The 
English  language  and  mode  of  life  would  follow,  it  was 
believed,  the  English  law.  The  one  effectual  way  of 
bringing  about  such  a  change  as  this  lay  in  a  complete 
conquest  of  the  island,  and  in  its  colonization  by  English 
settlers;  but  from  this  course,  pressed  on  him  as  it  was  by 
his  own  lieutenants  and  by  the  settlers  of  the  Pale,  even 
the  iron  will  of  Cromwell  shrank.  It  was  at  once  too 
bloody  and  too  expensive.  To  win  over  the  chiefs,  to  torn 
*hem  by  policy  and  a  patient  generosity  into  English  no- 
bles, to  use  the  traditional  devotion  of  their  tribal  de- 
pendents as  a  means  of  diffusing  the  new  civilization 
/>f  their  chiefs  to  trust  to  time  and  steady  govern- 
ment for  the  gradual  reformation  of  the  country,  was  a 


182  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  V. 

policy  safer,  cheaper,  more  humane,  and  more  statesman- 
like. 

It  was  this  system  which,  even  before  the  fall  of  the 
Geraldines,  Henry  had  resolved  to  adopt ;  and  it  was  this 
that  he  pressed  on  Ireland  when  the  conquest  laid  it  at  his 
feet.  The  chiefs  were  to  be  persuaded  of  the  advantages 
of  justice  and  legal  rule.  Their  fear  of  any  purpose  to 
"  expel  them  from  their  lands  and  dominions  lawfully  pos- 
sessed" was  to  be  dispelled  by  a  promise  "  to  conserve  them 
as  their  own."  Even  their  remonstrances  against  the  in- 
troduction of  English  law  were  to  be  regarded,  and  the 
course  of  justice  to  be  enforced  or  mitigated  according  to 
the  circumstances  of  the  country.  In  the  resumption  of 
lands  or  rights  which  clearly  belonged  to  the  Crown  "  sober 
ways,  politic  shifts,  and  amiable  persuasions"  were  to  be 
preferred  to  rigorous  dealing.  It  was  this  system  of  con- 
ciliation which  was  in  the  main  carried  out  by  the  English 
Government  under  Henry  and  his  two  successors.  Chief- 
tain after  chieftain  was  won  over  to  the  acceptance  of  the 
indenture  which  guaranteed  him  in  the  possession  of  his 
lands  and  left  his  authority  over  his  tribesmen  untouched 
on  condition  of  a  pledge  of  loyalty,  of  abstinence  from  ille- 
gal wars  and  exactions  on  his  fellow-subjects,  and  of  ren- 
dering a  fixed  tribute  and  service  in  war-time  to  the 
Crown.  The  sole  test  of  loyalty  demanded  was  the  ac- 
ceptance of  an  English  title  and  the  education  of  a  son  at 
the  English  court;  though  in  some  cases,  like  that  of  the 
O'Neills,  a  promise  was  exacted  to  use  the  English  lan- 
guage and  dress,  and  to  encourage  tillage  and  husbandry. 
Compliance  with  conditions  such  as  these  was  procured 
not  merely  by  the  terror  of  the  royal  name  but  by  heavy 
bribes.  The  chieftains  in  fact  profited  greatly  by  the 
change.  Not  only  were  the  lands  of  the  suppressed  abbeys 
granted  to  them  on  their  assumption  of  their  new  titles, 
but  the  English  law-courts,  ignoring  the  Irish  custom  by 
which  the  land  belonged  to  the  tribe  at  large,  regarded  the 
chiefs  as  the  sole  proprietors  of  the  soil.  The  merits  of 


CHAP.  4.']  THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1540.  183 

the  system  were  unquestionable ;  its  faults  were  such  as 
a  statesman  of  that  day  could  hardly  be  expected  to  per- 
ceive. The  Tudor  politicians  held  that  the  one  hope  for 
the  regeneration  of  Ireland  lay  in  its  absorbing  the  civili- 
zation of  England.  The  prohibition  of  the  national  dress, 
customs,  laws,  and  language  must  have  seemed  to  them 
merely  the  suppression  of  a  barbarism  which  stood  in  the 
way  of  all  improvement. 

With  England  and  Ireland  alike  at  his  feet  Cromwell 
could  venture  on  a  last  and  crowning  change.  He  could 
claim  for  the  monarchy  the  right  of  dictating  at  its  pleasure 
the  form  of  faith  and  doctrine  to  be  taught  throughout  the 
land.  Henry  had  remained  true  to  the  standpoint  of  the 
New  Learning;  and  the  sympathies  of  Cromwell  were 
mainly  with  those  of  his  master.  They  had  no  wish  for 
any  violent  break  with  the  ecclesiastical  forms  of  the  past. 
They  desired  religious  reform  rather  than  religious  revo- 
lution, a  simplification  of  doctrine  rather  than  any  radical 
change  in  it,  the  purification  of  worship  rather  than  the 
introduction  of  any  wholly  new  ritual.  Their  theology 
remained,  as  they  believed,  a  Catholic  theology,  but  a  the- 
ology cleared  of  the  superstitious  growths  which  obscured 
the  true  Catholicism  of  the  early  Church.  In  a  word  their 
dream  was  the  dream  of  Erasmus  and  Colet.  The  spirit 
of  Erasmus  was  seen  in  the  Articles  of  religion  which 
were  laid  before  Convocation  in  1536,  in  the  acknowledg- 
ment of  Justification  by  Faith,  a  doctrine  for  which  the 
founders  of  the  New  Learning,  such  as  Contarini  and  Pole, 
were  struggling  at  Rome  itself,  in  the  condemnation  of  pur- 
gatory, of  pardons,  and  of  masses  for  the  dead,  as  it  was 
seen  in  the  admission  of  prayers  for  the  dead  and  in  the 
retention  of  the  ceremonies  of  the  church  without  material 
change.  A  series  of  royal  injunctions  which  followed 
carried  out  the  same  policy  of  reform.  Pilgrimages  were 
suppressed ;  the  excessive  number  of  holy  days  was  cur- 
tailed ;  the  worship  of  images  and  relics  was  discouraged 
in  words  which  seem  almost  copied  from  the  protest  of 


184  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

Erasmus.  His  appeal  for  a  translation  of  the  Bible  which 
weavers  might  repeat  at  their  shuttle  and  ploughmen  sing 
at  their  plough  received  at  last  a  reply.  At  the  outset  of 
the  ministry  of  Norfolk  and  More  the  King  had  promised 
an  English  version  of  the  scriptures,  while  prohibiting  the 
circulation  of  Tyndale's  Lutheran  translation.  The  work 
however  lagged  in  the  hands  of  the  bishops ;  and  as  a  pre- 
liminary measure  the  Creed,  the  Lord's  Prayer,  and  the 
Ten  Commandments  were  now  rendered  into  English,  and 
ordered  to  be  taught  by  every  schoolmaster  and  father  of 
a  family  to  his  children  and  pupils.  But  the  bishops'  ver- 
sion still  hung  on  hand ;  till  in  despair  of  its  appearance  a 
friend  of  Archbishop  Cranmer,  Miles  Coverdale,  was  em- 
ployed to  correct  and  revise  the  translation  of  Tyndale ; 
and  the  Bible  which  he  edited  was  published  in  1538  under 
the  avowed  patronage  of  Henry  himself. 

But  the  force  of  events  was  already  carrying  England 
far  from  the  standpoint  of  Erasmus  or  More.  The  dream 
of  the  New  Learning  was  to  be  wrought  out  through  the 
progress  of  education  and  piety.  In  the  policy  of  Crom- 
well reform  was  to  be  brought  about  by  the  brute  force  of 
the  Monarchy.  The  story  of  the  royal  supremacy  was 
graven  even  on  the  titlepage  of  the  new  Bible.  It  is 
Henry  on  his  throne  who  gives  the  sacred  volume  to  Cran- 
mer, ere  Cranmer  and  Cromwell  can  distribute  it  to  the 
throng  of  priests  and  laymen  below.  Hitherto  men  had 
looked  on  religious  truth  as  a  gift  from  the  Church.  They 
were  now  to  look  on  it  as  a  gift  from  the  King.  The  very 
gratitude  of  Englishmen  for  fresh  spiritual  enlightenment 
was  to  tell  to  the  profit  of  the  royal  power.  No  conception 
could  be  further  from  that  of  the  New  Learning,  from  the 
plea  for  intellectual  freedom  which  runs  through  the  life 
of  Erasmus  or  the  craving  for  political  liberty  which  gives 
nobleness  to  the  speculations  of  More.  Nor  was  it  possible 
for  Henry  himself  to  avoid  drifting  from  the  standpoint  he 
had  chosen.  He  had  written  against  Luther ;  he  had  per- 
sisted in  opposing  Lutheran  doctrine;  he  had  passed  new 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1481-1540.  185 

laws  to  hinder  the  circulation  of  Lutheran  books  in  his 
realm.  But  influences  from  without  as  from  within  drove 
him  nearer  to  Lutheranism.  If  the  encouragemsnt  of 
Francis  had  done  somewhat  to  bring  about  his  final  Dreach 
with  the  Papacy,  he  soon  found  little  will  in  the  French 
King  to  follow  him  in  any  course  of  separation  from 
Rome ;  and  the  French  alliance  threatened  to  become  use- 
less as  a  shelter  against  the  wrath  of  the  Emperor. 
Charles  was  goaded  into  action  by  the  bill  annulling 
Mary's  right  of  succession;  and  in  1535  he  proposed  to 
unite  his  house  with  that  of  Francis  by  close  intermarriage 
and  to  sanction  Mary's  marriage  with  a  son  of  the  French 
King,  if  Francis  would  join  in  an  attack  on  England. 
Whether  such  a  proposal  was  serious  or  no,  Henry  had  to 
dread  attack  from  Charles  himself  and  to  look  for  new 
allies  against  it.  He  was  driven  to  offer  his  alliance  to 
the  Lutheran  princes  of  North  Germany,  who  dreaded 
like  himself  the  power  of  the  Emperor,  and  who  were  now 
gathering  in  the  League  of  Schmalkald. 

But  the  German  Princes  made  agreement  as  to  doctrine 
a  condition  of  their  alliance ;  and  their  pressure  was  backed 
by  Henry's  partisans  among  the  clergy  at  home.  In 
Cromwell's  scheme  for  mastering  the  priesthood  it  had 
been  needful  to  place  men  on  whom  the  King  could  rely 
at  their  head.  Cranmer  became  Primate,  Latimer  became 
Bishop  of  Worcester,  Shaxton  and  Barlow  were  raised  to 
the  sees  of  Salisbury  and  St.  David's,  Hilsey  to  that  of 
Rochester,  Goodrich  to  that  of  Ely,  Fox  to  that  of  Here- 
ford. But  it  was  hard  to  find  men  among  the  clergy  who 
paused  at  Henry's  theological  resting-place;  and  of  these 
prelates  all  except  Latimer  were  known  to  sympathize 
with  Lutheranism,  though  Cranmer  lagged  far  behind  his 
fellows  in  their  zeal  for  reform.  The  influence  of  these 
men  as  well  as  of  an  attempt  to  comply  at  least  partly  with 
the  demand  of  the  German  Princes  left  its  stamp  on  the 
Articles  of  1536.  For  the  principle  of  Catholicism,  of  a 
universal  form  of  faith  overspreading  all  temporal  domin- 


186  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

ions,  the  Lutheran  states  had  substituted  the  principle  of 
territorial  religion,  of  the  right  of  each  sovereign  or  people 
to  determine  the  form  of  belief  which  should  be  held  within 
their  bounds.  The  severance  from  Rome  had  already 
brought  Henry  to  this  principle;  and  the  Act  of  Supre- 
macy was  its  emphatic  assertion.  In  England  too,  as  in 
North  Germany,  the  repudiation  of  the  Papal  authority  as 
a  ground  of  faith,  of  the  voice  of  the  Pope  as  a  declaration 
of  truth,  had  driven  men  to  find  such  a  ground  and  dec- 
laration in  the  Bible ;  and  the  Articles  expressly  based  the 
faith  of  the  Church  of  England  on  the  Bible  and  the  three 
Creeds.  With  such  fundamental  principles  of  agreement 
it  was  possible  to  borrow  from  the  Augsburg  Confession 
five  of  the  ten  articles  which  Henry  laid  before  the  Convo- 
cation. If  penance  was  still  retained  as  a  sacrament,  bap- 
tism and  the  Lord's  Supper  were  alone  maintained  to  be 
sacraments  with  it;  the  doctrine  of  Tran substantiation 
which  Henry  stubbornly  maintained  differed  so  little  from 
the  doctrine  maintained  by  Luther  that  the  words  of  Lu- 
theran formularies  were  borrowed  to  explain  it;  Confession 
was  admitted  by  the  Lutheran  Churches  as  well  as  by  the 
English.  The  veneration  of  saints  and  the  doctrine  of 
prayer  to  them,  though  still  retained,  was  so  modified  as 
to  present  little  difficulty  even  to  a  Lutheran. 

However  disguised  in  form,  the  doctrinal  advance  made 
in  the  Articles  of  1536  was  an  immense  one;  and  a  vehe- 
ment opposition  might  have  been  looked  for  from  those  of 
the  bishops  like  Gardiner,  who  while  they  agreed  with 
Henry's  policy  of  establishing  a  national  Church  remained 
opposed  to  any  change  in  faith.  But  the  Articles  had 
been  drawn  up  by  Henry's  own  hand,  and  all  whisper  of 
opposition  was  hushed.  Bishops,  abbots,  clergy,  not  only 
subscribed  to  them,  but  carried  out  with  implicit  obedience 
the  injunctions  which  put  their  doctrine  roughly  into 
practice ;  and  the  failure  of  the  Pilgrimage  of  Grace  in 
the  following  autumn  ended  all  thought  of  resistance 
among  the  laity.  But  Cromwell  found  a  different  recep- 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461—1540.  187 

tion  for  his  reforms  when  he  turned  to  extend  them  to  the 
sister  island.  The  religious  aspect  of  Ireland  was  hardly 
less  chaotic  than  its  political  aspect  had  been.  Ever  since 
Strongbow's  landing  there  had  been  no  one  Irish  Church, 
simply  because  there  had  been  no  one  Irish  nation.  There 
was  not  the  slightest  difference  in  doctrine  or  discipline 
between  the  Church  without  the  Pale  and  the  Church 
within  it.  But  within  the  Pale  the  clergy  were  exclu- 
sively of  English  blood  and  speech,  and  without  it  they 
were  exclusively  of  Irish.  Irishmen  were  shut  out  by  law 
from  abbeys  and  churches  within  the  English  boundary ; 
and  the  ill- will  of  the  natives  shut  out  Englishmen  from 
churches  and  abbeys  outside  it.  As  to  the  religious  state 
of  the  country,  it  was  much  on  a  level  with  its  political 
condition.  Feuds  and  misrule  told  fatally  on  ecclesiastical 
discipline.  The  bishops  were  political  officers,  or  hard 
fighters  like  the  chiefs  around  them;  their  sees  were 
neglected,  their  cathedrals  abandoned  to  decay.  Through 
whole  dioceses  the  churches  lay  in  ruins  and  without 
priests.  The  only  preaching  done  in  the  country  was  done 
by  the  begging  friars,  and  the  results  of  the  friars'  preach- 
ing were  small.  "  If  the  King  do  not  provide  a  remedy," 
it  was  said  in  1525,  "there  will  be  no  more  Christentie 
than  in  the  middle  of  Turkey." 

Unfortunately  the  remedy  which  Henry  provided  was 
worse  than  the  disease.  Politically  Ireland  was  one  with 
England,  and  the  great  revolution  which  was  severing  the 
one  country  from  the  Papacy  extended  itself  naturally  to 
the  other.  The  results  of  it  indeed  at  first  seemed  small 
enough.  The  Supremacy,  a  question  which  had  convulsed 
England,  passed  over  into  Ireland  to  meet  its  only  obstacle 
in  a  general  indifference.  Everybody  was  ready  to  accept 
it  without  a  thought  of  the  consequences.  The  bishops 
and  clergy  within  the  Pale  bent  to  the  King's  will  as 
easily  as  their  fellows  iH  England,  and  their  example  was 
followed  by  at  least  four  prelates  of  dioceses  without  the 
Pale.  The  native  chieftains  made  no  more  scruple  than 


188  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

the  Lords  of  the  Council  in  renouncing  obedience  to  the 
Bishop  of  Rome,  and  in  acknowledging  Henry  as  the 
41  Supreme  Head  of  the  Church  of  England  and  Ireland 
under  Christ."  There  was  none  of  the  resistance  to  the 
dissolution  of  the  abbeys  which  had  been  witnessed  on  the 
other  side  of  the  Channel,  and  the  greedy  chieftains  showed 
themselves  perfectly  willing  to  share  the  plunder  of  the 
Church.  But  the  results  of  the  measure  were  fatal  to  the 
little  culture  and  religion  which  even  the  past  centuries  of 
disorder  had  spared.  Such  as  they  were,  the  religious 
houses  were  the  only  schools  that  Ireland  contained.  The 
system  of  vicars,  so  general  in  England,  was  rare  in  Ire- 
land ;  churches  in  the  patronage  of  the  abbeys  were  for  the 
most  part  served  by  the  religious  themselves,  and  the  dis- 
solution of  their  houses  suspended  public  worship  over 
large  districts  of  the  country.  The  friars,  hitherto  the 
only  preachers,  and  who  continued  to  labor  and  teach  in 
spite  of  the  efforts  of  the  Government,  were  thrown  neces- 
sarily into  a  position  of  antagonism  to  the  English  rule. 

Had  the  ecclesiastical  changes  which  were  forced  on  the 
country  ended  here  however,  in  the  end  little  harm  would 
have  been  done.  But  in  England  the  breach  with  Rome, 
the  destruction  of  the  monastic  orders,  and  the  establish- 
ment of  the  Supremacy,  had  roused  in  a  portion  of  the 
people  itself  a  desire  for  theological  change  which  Henry 
shared  and  was  cautiously  satisfying.  In  Ireland  ihe 
spirit  of  the  Reformation  never  existed  among  the  people 
at  all.  They  accepted  the  legislative  measures  passed  in 
the  English  Parliament  without  any  dream  of  theological 
consequences  or  of  any  change  in  the  doctrine  or  ceremo- 
nies of  the  Church.  Not  a  single  voice  demanded  the 
abolition  of  pilgrimages,  or  the  destruction  of  images,  or 
the  reform  of  public  worship.  The  mission  of  Archbishop 
Browne  in  1535  "for  the  plucking  down  of  idols  and  ex- 
tinguishing of  idolatry"  was  a  first  step  in  the  long  effort 
of  the  English  Government  to  force  a  new  faith  on  a  peo- 
ple who  to  a  man  clung  passionately  to  their  old  religion. 


CHAP.  4.)  THE  MONARCHY.     1461—1540.  189 

Browne's  attempts  at  "  tuning  the  pulpits"  were  met  by  a 
sullen  and  significant  opposition.  "  Neither  by  gentle  ex- 
hortation," the  Archbishop  wrote  to  Cromwell,  "nor  by 
evangelical  instruction,  neither  by  oath  of  them  solemnly 
taken,  nor  yet  by  threats  of  sharp  correction  may  I  per- 
suade or  induce  any  whether  religious  or  secular  since  my 
coming  over  once  to  preach  the  Word  of  God  nor  the  just 
title  of  our  illustrious  Prince."  Even  the  acceptance  of 
the  Supremacy,  which  had  been  so  quietly  effected,  was 
brought  into  question  when  its  results  became  clear.  The 
bishops  abstained  from  compliance  with  the  order  to  erase 
the  Pope's  name  out  of  their  mass-books.  The  pulpits  re- 
mained steadily  silent.  When  Browne  ordered  the  de- 
struction of  the  images  and  relics  in  his  own  cathedral,  he 
had  to  report  that  the  prior  and  canons  "  find  them  so  sweet 
for  their  gain  that  they  heed  not  my  words."  Cromwell 
however  was  resolute  for  a  religious  uniformity  between 
the  two  islands,  and  the  Primate  borrowed  some  of  his 
patron's  vigor.  Recalcitrant  priests  were  thrown  into 
prison,  images  were  plucked  down  from  the  rood-loft,  and 
the  most  venerable  of  Irish  relics,  the  staff  of  St.  Patrick, 
was  burned  in  the  market-place.  But  he  found  no  sup- 
port in  his  vigor  save  from  across  the  Channel.  The  Irish 
Council  looked  coldly  on ;  even  the  Lord  Deputy  still  knelt 
to  say  prayers  before  an  image  at  Trim.  A  sullen  dogged 
opposition  baffled  Cromwell's  efforts,  and  their  only  result 
was  to  unite  all  Ireland  against  the  Crown. 

But  Cromwell  found  it  easier  to  deal  with  Irish  inaction 
than  with  the  feverish  activity  which  his  reforms  stirred 
in  England  itself.  It  was  impossible  to  strike  blow  after 
blow  at  the  Church  without  rousing  wild  hopes  in  the 
party  who  sympathized  with  the  work  which  Luther  was 
doing  over-sea.  Few  as  these  "  Lutherans  "  or  "  Protes- 
tants "  still  were  in  numbers,  their  new  hopes  made  them  a 
formidable  force ;  and  in  the  school  of  persecution  they  had 
learned  a  violence  which  delighted  in  outrages  on  the  faith 
which  had  so  long  trampled  them  under  foot  At  the 


190  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

very  outset  of  Cromwell's  changes  four  Suffolk  youths 
broke  into  a  church  at  Dovercourt,  tore  down  a  wonder- 
working crucifix,  and  burned  it  in  the  fields.  The  sup- 
pression of  the  lesser  monasteries  was  the  signal  for  a  new 
outburst  of  ribald  insult  to  the  old  religion.  The  rough- 
ness, insolence,  and  extortion  of  the  Commissioners  sent? 
to  effect  it  drove  the  whole  monastic  body  to  despair. 
Their  servants  rode  along  the  road  with  copes  for  doublets 
or  tunicles  for  saddle-cloths,  and  scattered  panic  among 
the  larger  houses  which  were  left.  Some  sold  their  jewels 
and  relics  to  provide  for  the  evil  day  they  saw  approach- 
ing. Some  begged  of  their  own  will  for  dissolution.  It 
was  worse  when  fresh  ordinances  of  the  Vicar-General 
ordered  the  removal  of  objects  of  superstitious  veneration. 
Their  removal,  bitter  enough  to  those  whose  religion  twined 
itself  around  the  image  or  the  relic  which  was  taken  away, 
was  embittered  yet  more  by  the  insults  with  which  it  was 
accompanied.  A  miraculous  rood  at  Boxley,  which  bowed 
its  head  and  stirred  its  eyes,  was  paraded  from  market  to 
market  and  exhibited  as  a  juggle  before  the  Court.  Im- 
ages of  the  Virgin  were  stripped  of  their  costly  vestments 
and  sent  to  be  publicly  burned  at  London.  Latimer  for- 
warded to  the  capital  the  figure  of  Our  Lady,  which  he 
had  thrust  out  of  his  cathedral  church  at  Worcester,  with 
rough  words  of  scorn :  "  She  with  her  old  sister  of  Wal- 
singham,  her  younger  sister  of  Ipswich,  and  their  two 
other  sisters  of  Doncaster  and  Penrice,  would  make  a  jolly 
muster  at  Smithfield."  Fresh  orders  were  given  to  fling 
all  relics  from  their  reliquaries,  and  to  level  every  shrine 
with  the  ground.  In  1538  the  bones  of  St.  Thomas  of 
Canterbury  were  torn  from  the  stately  shrine  which  had 
been  the  glory  of  his  metropolitan  church,  and  his  name 
was  erased  from  the  service-books  as  that  of  a  traitor. 

The  introduction  of  the  English  Bible  into  churches 
gave  a  new  opening  for  the  zeal  of  the  Protestants.  In 
spite  of  royal  injunctions  that  it  should  be  read  decently 
and  without  comment,  the  young  zealots  of  the  party 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1540.  191 

prided  themselves  on  shouting  it  out  to  a  circle  of  excited 
hearers  during  the  service  of  mass,  and  accompanied  their 
reading  with  violent  expositions.  Protestant  maidens 
took  the  new  English  primer  to  church  with  them  and 
studied  it  ostentatiously  during  matins.  Insult  passed 
into  open  violence  when  the  Bishops'  Courts  were  invaded 
and  broken  up  by  Protestanft  mobs ;  and  law  and  public 
opinion  were  outraged  at  once  when  priests  who  favored 
the  new  doctrines  began  openly  to  bring  home  wives  to 
their  vicarages.  A  fiery  outburst  of  popular  discussion 
compensated  for  the  silence  of  the  pulpits.  The  new 
Scriptures,  in  Henry's  bitter  words  of  complaint,  were 
"  disputed,  rhymed,  sung,  and  jangled  in  every  tavern  and 
alehouse."  The  articles  which  dictated  the  belief  of  the 
English  Church  roused  a  furious  controversy.  Above  all, 
the  Sacrament  of  the  Mass,  the  centre  of  the  Catholic  sys- 
tem of  faith  and  worship,  and  which  still  remained  sacred 
to  the  bulk  of  Englishmen,  was  attacked  with  a  scurrility 
and  profaneness  which  passes  belief.  The  doctrine  of 
Transubstantiation,  which  was  as  yet  recognized  by  law, 
was  held  up  to  scorn  in  ballads  and  mystery  plays.  In 
one  church  a  Protestant  lawyer  raised  a  dog  in  his  hands 
when  the  priest  elevated  the  Host.  The  most  sacred  words 
of  the  old  worship,  the  words  of  consecration,  "  Hoc  est 
corpus,"  were  travestied  into  a  nickname  for  jugglery  as 
"Hocus-pocus." 

It  was  by  this  attack  on  the  Mass,  even  more  than  by 
the  other  outrages,  that  the  temper  both  of  Henry  and  the 
nation  was  stirred  to  a  deep  resentment.  With  the  Prot- 
estants Henry  had  no  sympathy  whatever.  He  was  a 
man  of  the  New  Learning;  he  was  proud  of  his  orthodoxy 
and  of  his  title  of  Defender  of  the  Faith.  And  above  all 
he  shared  to  the  utmost  his  people's  love  of  order,  their 
clinging  to  the  past,  their  hatred  of  extravagance  and  ex- 
cess. The  first  sign  of  reaction  was  seen  in  the  Parliament 
of  1539.  Never  had  the  Houses  shown  so  little  care  for 
political  liberty.  The  Monarchy  seemed  to  free  itself  from 

9  VOL.  2 


192  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

all  parliamentary  restrictions  whatever  when  a  formal 
statute  gave  the  King's  proclamations  the  force  of  parlia- 
mentary laws.  Nor  did  the  Church  find  favor  with  them. 
No  word  of  the  old  opposition  was  heard  when  a  bill  was 
introduced  granting  to  the  King  the  greater  monasteries 
which  had  been  saved  in  1536.  More  than  six  hundred 
religious  houses  fell  at  a  blow,  and  so  great  was  the  spoil 
that  the  King  promised  never  again  to  call  on  his  people 
for  subsidies.  But  the  Houses  were  equally  at  one  in 
withstanding  the  new  innovations  of  religion,  and  an  act 
for  "abolishing  diversity  of  opinions  in  certain  articles 
concerning  Christian  religion"  passed  with  general  assent. 
On  the  doctrine  of  Transubstantiation,  which  was  re- 
asserted by  the  first  of  six  Articles  to  which  the  Act  owes 
its  usual  name,  there  was  no  difference  of  feeling  or  belief 
between  the  men  of  the  New  Learning  and  the  older  Cath- 
olics. But  the  road  to  a  further  instalment  of  even  moder- 
ate reform  seemed  closed  by  the  five  other  articles  which 
sanctioned  communion  in  one  kind,  the  celibacy  of  the 
clergy,  monastic  vows,  private  masses,  and  auricular  con- 
fession. A  more  terrible  feature  of  the  reaction  was  the 
revival  of  persecution.  Burning  was  denounced  as  the 
penalty  for  a  denial  of  transubstantiation ;  on  a  second 
offence  it  became  the  penalty  for  an  infraction  of  the  other 
five  doctrines.  A  refusal  to  confess  or  to  attend  Mass  was 
made  felony.  It  was  in  vain  that  Cranmer,  with  the  five 
bishops  who  partially  sympathized  with  the  Protestants, 
struggled  against  the  bill  in  the  Lords :  the  Commons  were 
"all  of  one  opinion,"  and  Henry  himself  acted  as  spokes- 
man on  the  side  of  the  articles.  In  London  alone  five 
hundred  Protestants  were  indicted  under  the  new  act. 
Latimer  and  Shaxton  were  imprisoned,  and  the  former 
forced  into  a  resignation  of  his  see.  Cranmer  himself  was 
only  saved  by  Henry's  personal  favor. 

But  the  first  burst  of  triumph  was  no  sooner  spent  than 
the  hand  of  Cromwell  made  itself  felt.  Though  his  opin- 
ions remained  those  of  the  New  Learning  and  differed 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  MONARCHY.    1461-1540.  193 

little  from  the  general  sentiment  which  found  itself  repre- 
sented in  the  act,  he  leaned  instinctively  to  the  one  party 
which  did  not  long  for  his  fall.  His  wish  was  to  restrain 
the  Protestant  excesses,  but  he  had  no  mind  to  ruin  the 
Protestants.  In  a  little  time  therefore  the  bishops  were 
quietly  released.  The  London  indictments  were  quashed. 
The  magistrates  were  checked  in  their  enforcement  of  the 
law,  while  a  general  pardon  cleared  the  prisons  of  the 
heretics  who  had  been  arrested  under  its  provisions.  A 
few  months  after  the  enactment  of  the  Six  Articles  we 
find  from  a  Protestant  letter  that  persecution  had  wholly 
ceased,  "the  Word  is  powerfully  preached  and  books  of 
every  kind  may  safely  be  exposed  for  sale."  Never  indeed 
had  Cromwell  shown  such  greatness  as  in  his  last  struggle 
against  Fate.  "Beknaved"  by  the  King,  whose  confi- 
dence in  him  waned  as  he  discerned  the  full  meaning  of 
the  religious  changes  which  Cromwell  had  brought  about, 
met  too  by  a  growing  opposition  in  the  Council  as  his 
favor  declined,  the  temper  of  the  man  remained  indomi- 
table as  ever.  He  stood  absolutely  alone.  Wolsey,  hated 
as  he  had  been  by  the  nobles,  had  been  supported  by  the 
Church ;  but  Churchmen  hated  Cromwell  with  an  even 
fiercer  hate  than  the  nobles  themselves.  His  only  friends 
were  the  Protestants,  and  their  friendship  was  more  fatal 
than  the  hatred  of  his  foes.  But  he  showed  no  signs  of 
fear  or  of  halting  in  the  course  he  had  entered  on.  So 
long  as  Henry  supported  him,  however  reluctant  his  sup- 
port might  be,  he  was  more  than  a  match  for  his  foes. 
He  was  strong  enough  to  expel  his  chief  opponent,  Bishop 
Gardiner  of  Winchester,  from  the  royal  Council.  He  met 
the  hostility  of  the  nobles  with  a  threat  which  marked  his 
power.  "  If  the  lords  would  handle  him  so,  he  would  give 
them  such  a  breakfast  as  never  was  made  in  England,  and 
that  the  proudest  of  them  should  know." 

He  soon  gave  a  terrible  earnest  of  the  way  in  which  he 
could  fulfil  his  threat.  The  opposition  to  his  system 
gathered  above  all  round  two  houses  which  represented 


194  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

what  yet  lingered  of  the  Yorkist  tradition,  the  Courtenays 
and  the  Poles.  Courtenay,  the  Marquis  of  Exeter,  was  of 
royal  blood,  a  grandson  through  his  mother  of  Edward  the 
Fourth.  He  was  known  to  have  bitterly  denounced  the 
"  knaves  that  ruled  about  the  King ; "  and  his  threats  to 
"give  them  some  day  a  buffet"  were  formidable  in  the 
mouth  of  one  whose  influence  in  the  western  counties  was 
supreme.  Margaret,  the  Countess  of  Salisbury,  a  daugh- 
ter of  the  Duke  of  Clarence  by  the  heiress  of  the  Earl  of 
Warwick,  and  a  niece  of  Edward  the  Fourth,  had  married 
Sir  Richard  Pole,  and  became  mother  of  Lord  Montacute 
as  of  Sir  Geoffry  and  Reginald  Pole.  The  temper  of  her 
house  might  be  guessed  from  the  conduct  of  the  younger 
of  the  three  brothers.  After  refusing  the  highest  favors 
from  Henry  as  the  price  of  his  approval  of  the  divorce, 
Reginald  Pole  had  taken  refuge  at  Rome,  where  he  had 
bitterly  attacked  the  King  in  a  book  on  "  The  Unity  of  the 
Church."  "There  may  be  found  ways  enough  in  Italy," 
Cromwell  wrote  to  him  in  significant  words,  "  to  rid  a 
treacherous  subject.  When  Justice  can  take  no  place  by 
process  of  law  at  home,  sometimes  she  may  be  enforced  to 
take  new  means  abroad."  But  he  had  left  hostages  in 
Henry's  hands.  "  Pity  that  the  folly  of  one  witless  fool," 
Cromwell  wrote  ominously,  "should  be  the  ruin  of  so 
great  a  family.  Let  him  follow  ambition  as  fast  as  he 
can,  those  that  little  have  offended  (saving  that  he  is  of 
their  kin),  were  it  not  for  the  great  mercy  and  benignity 
of  the  prince,  should  and  might  feel  what  it  is  to  have  such 
a  traitor  as  their  kinsman."  The  "great  mercy  and  be- 
nignity of  the  prince"  was  no  longer  to  shelter  them.  In 
1538  the  Pope,  Paul  the  Third,  published  a  bull  of  excom- 
munication and  deposition  against  Henry,  and  Pole 
pressed  the  Emperor  vigorously  though  ineffectually  to 
carry  the  bull  into  execution.  His  efforts  only  brought 
about,  as  Cromwell  had  threatened,  the  ruin  of  his  house. 
His  brother  Lord  Montacute  and  the  Marquis  of  Exeter, 
with  other  friends  of  the  two  great  families,  were  arrested 


CHAP.  4]  THE  MONARCHY.     1461-1540.  195 

on  a  charge  of  treason  and  executed  in  the  opening  of  1539, 
while  the  Countess  of  Salisbury  was  attainted  in  Parlia- 
ment and  sent  to  the  Tower. 

Almost  as  terrible  an  act  of  bloodshed  closed  the  year. 
The  abbots  of  Glastonbury,  Reading,  and  Colchester,  men 
who  had  sat  as  mitred  abbots  among  the  lords,  were 
charged  with  a  denial  of  the  King's  supremacy  and  hanged 
as  traitors.  But  Cromwell  relied  for  success  on  more  than 
terror.  His  single  will  forced  on  a  scheme  of  foreign  policy 
whose  aim  was  to  bind  England  to  the  cause  of  the  Refor- 
mation while  it  bound  Henry  helplessly  to  his  minister. 
The  daring  boast  which  his  enemies  laid  afterward  to 
Cromwell's  charge,  whether  uttered  or  not,  is  but  the  ex- 
pression of  his  system,  "  In  brief  time  he  would  bring 
things  to  such  a  pass  that  the  King  with  all  his  power 
should  not  be  able  to  hinder  him."  His  plans  rested,  like 
the  plan  which  proved  fatal  to  Wolsey,  on  a  fresh  mar- 
riage of  his  master;  Henry's  third  wife,  Jane  Seymour, 
had  died  in  child-birth;  and  in  the  opening  of  1540  Crom- 
well replaced  her  by  a  German  consort,  Anne  of  Cleves,  a 
sister-in-law  of  the  Lutheran  elector  of  Saxony.  He  dared 
even  to  resist  Henry's  caprice  when  the  King  revolted  on 
their  first  interview  from  the  coarse  features  and  unwieldy 
form  of  his  new  bride.  ,  For  the  moment  Cromwell  had 
brought  matters  "  to  such  a  pass"  that  it  was  impossible 
to  recoil  from  the  marriage,  and  the  minister's  elevation 
to  the  Earldom  of  Essex  seemed  to  proclaim  his  success. 
The  marriage  of  Anne  of  Cleves  however  was  but  the  first 
step  in  a  policy  which,  had  it  been  carried  out  as  he  de- 
signed it,  would  have  anticipated  the  triumphs  of  Riche- 
lieu. Charles  and  the  House  of  Austria  could  alone  bring 
about  a  Catholic  reaction  strong  enough  to  arrest  and  roll 
back  the  Reformation ;  and  Cromwell  was  no  sooner  united 
with  the  princes  of  North  Germany  than  he  sought  to 
league  them  with  France  for  the  overthrow  of  the  Emperor. 

Had  he  succeeded,  the  whole  face  of  Europe  would  have 
been  changed,  Southern  Germany  would  have  been  secured 


196  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BOOK  V. 

for  Protestantism,  and  the  Thirty  Years'  War  averted. 
But  he  failed  as  men  fail  who  stand  ahead  of  their  age. 
The  German  princes  shrank  from  a  contest  with  the  Em- 
peror, France  from  a  struggle  which  would  be  fatal  to 
Catholicism ;  and  Henry,  left  alone  to  bear  the  resentment 
of  the  House  of  Austria  and  chained  to  a  wife  he  loathed, 
turned  savagely  on  his  minister.  In  June  the  long  strug- 
gle came  to  an  end.  The  nobles  sprang  on  Cromwell  with 
a  fierceness  that  told  of  their  long-hoarded  hate.  Taunts 
and  execrations  burst  from  the  Lords  at  the  Council  table 
as  the  Duke  of  Norfolk,  who  had  been  entrusted  with  the 
minister's  arrest,  tore  the  ensign  of  the  Garter  from  his 
neck.  At  the  charge  of  treason  Cromwell  flung  his  cap 
on  the  ground  with  a  passionate  cry  of  despair.  "  This 
then,"  he  exclaimed,  "is  my  guerdon  for  the  services  I 
have  done !  On  your  consciences,  I  ask  you,  am  I  a  trai- 
tor?" Then  with  a  sudden  sense  that  all  was  over  he  bade 
his  foes  make  quick  work,  and  not  leave  him  to  languish 
in  prison.  Quick  work  was  made.  A  few  days  after  his 
arrest  he  was  attainted  in  Parliament,  and  at  the  close  of 
July  a  burst  of  popular  applause  hailed  his  death  on  the 
scaffold. 


BOOK  VI. 
THE  REFORMATION. 

1540—1603. 


AUTHORITIES  FOR  BOOK  VL 

1540—1603. 

For  the  close  of  Henry  the  Eighth's  reign  as  for  the  reigns  of 
Edward  and  Mary  we  possess  copious  materials.  Strype  covers  this 
period  in  his  "  Memorials"  and  in  his  lives  of  Cranmer,  Cheke,  and 
Smith;  Hayward's  "Life  of  Edward  the  Sixth"  may  be  supple- 
mented by  the  young  King's  own  Journal ;  "Machyn's  Diary"  gives 
us  the  aspect  of  affairs  as  they  presented  themselves  to  a  common 
Englishman  ;  while  Holinshed  is  near  enough  to  serve  as  a  contem- 
porary authority.  The  troubled  period  of  the  Protectorate  is  illus- 
trated by  Mr.  Tytler  in  the  correspondence  which  he  has  published 
in  his  "  England  under  Edward  the  Sixth  and  Mary, "  while  much 
light  is  thrown  on  its  close  by  Mr.  Nicholls  in  the  "  Chronicle  of 
Queen  Jane, "  published  by  the  Camden  Society.  In  spite  of  count- 
less errors,  of  Puritan  prejudices,  and  some  deliberate  suppressions 
of  the  truth,  its  mass  of  facts  and  wonderful  charm  of  style  will 
always  give  importance  to  the  "  Acts  and  Monuments"  or  "  Book  of 
Martyrs"  of  John  Foxe,  as  a  record  of  the  Marian  persecution. 
Among  outer  observers,  the  Venetian  Soranzo  throws  some  light  on 
the  Protectorate  ;  and  the  dispatches  of  Giovanni  Michiel,  published 
by  Mr.  Friedmann,  give  us  a  new  insight  into  the  events  of  Mary's 
reign. 

For  the  succeeding  reign  we  have  a  valuable  contemporary  ac- 
count in  Camden's  "Life  of  Elizabeth."  The  "Annals"  of  Sir  John 
Hay  ward  refer  to  the  first  four  years  of  the  Queen's  rule.  Its  polit- 
ical and  diplomatic  side  is  only  now  being  fully  unveiled  in  the 
Calendar  of  State  Papers  for  this  period,  which  are  being  issued  by 
the  Master  of  the  Rolls,  and  fresh  light  has  yet  to  be  looked  for  from 
the  Cecil  Papers  and  the  documents  at  Simancas,  some  of  which  are 
embodied  in  the  history  of  this  reign  by  Mr.  Froude.  Among  the 
published  materials  for  this  time  we  have  the  Burleigh  Papers,  the 
Sidney  Papers,  the  Sadler  State  Papers,  much  correspondence  in  the 
Hardwicke  State  Papers,  the  letters  published  by  Mr.  Wright  in  his 
"  Elizabeth  and  her  Times, "  the  collections  of  Murdin,  the  Egerton 
Papers,  the  "Letters  of  Elizabeth  and  James  the  Sixth"  published 
by  Mr.  Bruce.  Harrington' s"Nugae  Antiquse"  contain  some  details 
of  value.  Among  foreign  materials  as  yet  published  the  "  Papiers 
d'Etat"  of  Cardinal  Granvelle  and  the  series  of  French  dispatches 
published  by  M.  Teulet  are  among  the  more  important.  Mr.  Motley 
in  his  "Rise  of  the  Dutch  Republic"  and  "History  of  the  United 
Netherlands"  has  used  the  State  Papers  of  the  countries  concerned  in 
this  struggle  to  pour  a  flood  of  new  light  on  the  diplomacy  and  outer 
policy  of  Burleigh  and  his  mistress.  His  wide  and  independent  re- 
search among  the  same  class  of  documents  gives  almost  an  original 


200  HISTORY   OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE. 

value  to  Ranke's  treatment  of  this  period  in  his  English  History. 
The  earlier  religious  changes  in  Scotland  have  been  painted  with 
wonderful  energy,  and  on  the  whole  with  truthfulness,  by  Knox 
himself  in  his  "History  of  the  Reformation."  Among  the  contem- 
porary materials  for  the  history  of  Mary  Stuart  we  have  the  well- 
known  works  of  Buchanan  and  Leslie,  Lebanon's  "Lettres  et 
Memoires  de  Marie  Stuart, "  the  correspondence  appended  to  Mignet's 
biography,  Stevenson's  "Illustrations  of  the  Life  of  Queen  Mary," 
Melville's  Memoirs,  and  the  collections  of  Keith  and  Anderson. 

For  the  religious  history  of  Elizabeth's  reign  Strype,  as  usual, 
gives  us  copious  details  in  his  "  Annals, "  his  lives  of  Parker,  Grin- 
dal,  and  Whitgift.  Some  light  is  thrown  on  the  Queen's  earlier 
steps  by  the  Zurich  Letters  published  by  the  Parker  Society.  The 
strife  with  the  later  Puritans  can  only  be  fairly  judged  after  reading 
the  Martin  Marprelate  Tracts,  which  have  been  reprinted  by  Mr. 
Maskell,  who  has  given  a  short  abstract  of  the  more  important  in 
his  "History  of  the  Martin  Marprelate  Controversy."  Her  policy 
toward  the  Catholics  is  set  out  in  Burieigh's  tract,  "  The  Execution  of 
Justice  in  England,  not  for  Religion,  but  for  Treason, "  which  was 
answered  by  Allen  in  his  "  Defence  of  the  English  Catholics. "  On 
the  actual  working  of  the  penal  laws  much  new  information  has 
been  given  us  in  the  series  of  contemporary  narratives  published  by 
Father  Morris  under  the  title  of  "  The  Troubles  of  our  Catholic  Fore- 
fathers ;"  the  general  history  of  the  Catholics  may  be  found  in  the 
work  of  Dodd  ;  and  the  sufferings  of  the  Jesuits  in  More's  "  Historia 
Provincise  Anglicanse  Societatis  Jesu. "  To  these  may  be  added  Mr. 
Simpson's  biography  of  Campion.  For  our  constitutional  history 
during  Elizabeth's  reign  we  have  D'Ewes'  Journals  and  Townshend's 
"Journal  of  Parliamentary  Proceedings  from  1580  to  1601,"  the 
first  detailed  account  we  possess  of  the  proceedings  of  the  House  of 
Commons.  Macpherson  in  his  Annals  of  Commerce  gives  details  of 
the  wonderful  expansion  of  English  trade  during  this  period,  and 
Hackluyt's  collection  of  Voyages  tells  of  its  wonderful  activity. 
Amid  a  crowd  of  biographers,  whose  number  marks  the  new  im- 
portance of  individual  life  and  action  at  the  time,  we  may  note  as 
embodying  information  elsewhere  inaccessible  the  lives  of  Hatton 
and  Davison  by  Sir  Harris  Nicolas,  the  three  accounts  of  Raleigh  by 
Oldys,  Tytler,  and  Mr.  Edwards,  the  Lives  of  the  two  Devereux, 
Earls  of  Essex,  Mr.  Spedding's  "Life  of  Bacon,"  and  Barrow's  "Life 
of  Sir  Francis  Drake. " 


CHAPTER  I . 

THE  PROTESTANT  REVOLUTION. 
1540—1553. 

AT  the  death  of  Cromwell  the  success  of  his  policy  wag 
complete.  The  Monarchy  had  reached  the  height  of  its 
power.  The  old  liberties  of  England  lay  prostrate  at  the 
feet  of  the  King.  The  Lords  were  cowed  and  spiritless ; 
the  House  of  Commons  was  filled  with  the  creatures  of  the 
Court  and  degraded  into  an  engine  of  tyranny.  Royal 
proclamations  were  taking  the  place  of  parliamentary  leg- 
islation ;  royal  benevolences  were  encroaching  more  and 
more  on  the  right  of  parliamentary  taxation.  Justice  was 
prostituted  in  the  ordinary  courts  to  the  royal  will,  while 
the  boundless  and  arbitrary  powers  of  the  royal  Council 
were  gradually  superseding  the  slower  processes  of  the 
Common  Law.  The  religious  changes  had  thrown  an 
almost  sacred  character  over  the  "  majesty"  of  the  King. 
Henry  was  the  Head  of  ,the  Church.  From  the  primate 
to  the  meanest  deacon  every  minister  of  it  derived  from  him 
his  sole  right  to  exercise  spiritual  powers.  The  voice  of 
its  preachers  was  the  echo  of  his  will.  He  alone  could 
define  orthodoxy  or  declare  heresy.  The  forms  of  its  wor- 
ship and  belief  were  changed  and  rechanged  at  the  royal 
caprice.  Half  of  its  wealth  went  to  swell  the  royal  treas- 
ury, and  the  other  half  lay  at  the  King's  mercy.  It  was 
this  unprecedented  concentration  of  all  power  in  the  hands 
of  a  single  man  that  overawed  the  imagination  of  Henry's 
subjects.  He  was  regarded  as  something  high  above  the 
laws  which  govern  common  men.  The  voices  of  states- 
men and  priests  extolled  his  wisdom  and  authority  as  more 
than  human.  The  Parliament  itself  rose  and  bowed  to 


202  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boos  VI. 

the  vacant  throne  when  his  name  was  mentioned.  An 
absolute  devotion  to  his  person  replaced  the  old  loyalty  to 
the  law.  When  the  Primate  of  the  English  Church  de- 
scribed the  chief  merit  of  Cromwell,  it  was  by  asserting 
that  he  loved  the  King  "no  less  than  he  loved  God." 

It  was  indeed  Cromwell  who  more  than  any  man  had 
reared  this  fabric  of  King-worship.  But  he  had  hardly 
reared  it  when  it  began  to  give  way.  The  very  success  of 
his  measures  indeed  brought  about  the  ruin  of  his  policy. 
One  of  the  most  striking  features  of  Cromwell's  system 
had  been  his  development  of  parliamentary  action.  The 
great  assembly  which  the  Monarchy  had  dreaded  and  si- 
lenced from  the  days  of  Edward  the  Fourth  to  the  days  of 
Wolsey  had  been  called  to  the  front  again  at  the  Cardinal's 
fall.  Proud  of  his  popularity,  and  conscious  of  his  people's 
sympathy  with  him  in  his  protest  against  a  foreign  juris- 
diction, Henry  set  aside  the  policy  of  the  Crown  to  deal  a 
heavier  blow  at  the  Papacy.  Both  the  parties  represented 
in  the  ministry  that  followed  Wolsey  welcomed  the  change, 
for  the  nobles  represented  by  Norfolk  and  the  men  of  the 
New  Learning  represented  by  More  regarded  Parliament 
with  the  same  favor.  More  indeed  in  significant  though 
almost  exaggerated  phrases  set  its  omnipotence  face  to 
face  with  the  growing  despotism  of  the  Crown.  The 
policy  of  Cromwell  fell  in  with  this  revival  of  the  two 
Houses.  The  daring  of  his  temper  led  him  not  to  dread 
and  suppress  national  institutions,  but  to  seize  them  and 
master  them,  and  to  turn  them  into  means  of  enhancing 
the  royal  power.  As  he  saw  in  the  Church  a  means  of 
raising  the  King  into  the  spiritual  ruler  of  the  faith  and 
consciences  of  his  people,  so  he  saw  in  the  Parliament  a 
means  of  shrouding  the  boldest  aggressions  of  the  mon- 
archy under  the  veil  of  popular  assent,  and  of  giving  to 
the  most  ruthless  acts  of  despotism  the  stamp  and  sem- 
blance of  law.  He  saw  nothing  to  fear  in  a  House  of 
Lords  whose  nobles  cowered  helpless  before  the  might  of 
the  Crown,  and  whose  spiritual  members  his  policy  was 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-160a  203 

degrading  into  mere  tools  of  the  royal  will.  Nor  could  he 
find  anything  to  dread  in  a  House  of  Commons  which  was 
crowded  with  members  directly  or  indirectly  nominated 
by  the  royal  Council.  With  a  Parliament  such  as  this 
Cromwell  might  well  trust  to  make  the  nation  itself 
through  its  very  representatives  an  accomplice  in  the  work 
of  absolutism. 

His  trust  seemed  more  than  justified  by  the  conduct  of 
the  Houses.  It  was  by  parliamentary  statutes  that  the 
Church  was  prostrated  at  the  feet  of  the  Monarchy.  It 
was  by  bills  of  attainder  that  great  nobles  were  brought  to 
the  block.  It  was  under  constitutional  forms  that  freedom 
was  gagged  with  new  treasons  and  oaths  and  questionings. 
One  of  the  first  bills  of  Cromwell's  Parliaments  freed 
Henry  from  the  need  of  paying  his  debts,  one  of  the  last 
gave  his  proclamations  the  force  of  laws.  In  the  action 
of  the  two  Houses  the  Crown  seemed  to  have  discovered  a 
means  of  carrying  its  power  into  regions  from  which  a 
bare  despotism  has  often  had  to  shrink.  Henry  might 
have  dared  single-handed  to  break  with  Rome  or  to  send 
Sir  Thomas  More  to  the  block.  But  without  Parliament 
to  back  him  he  could  hardly  have  ventured  on  such  an 
enormous  confiscation  of  property  as  was  involved  in  the 
suppression  of  the  monasteries  or  on  such  changes  in  the 
national  religion  as  were  brought  about  by  the  Ten  Arti- 
cles and  the  Six.  It  was  this  discovery  of  the  use  to  which 
the  Houses  could  be  turned  that  accounts  for  the  immense 
development  of  their  powers,  the  immense  widening  of 
their  range  of  action,  which  they  owe  to  Cromwell.  Now 
that  the  great  engine  was  at  his  own  command  he  used  it 
as  it  had  never  been  used  before.  Instead  of  rare  and 
short  assemblies  of  Parliament,  England  saw  it  gathered 
year  after  year.  All  the  jealousy  with  which  the  Crown 
had  watched  its  older  encroachments  on  the  prerogative 
was  set  aside.  Matters  which  had  even  in  the  days  of 
their  greatest  influence  been  scrupulously  withheld  from 
the  cognizance  of  the  Houses  were  now  absolutely  forced 


204  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

on  their  attention.  It  was  by  Parliament  that  England 
was  torn  from  the  great  body  of  Western  Christendom. 
It  was  by  parliamentary  enactment  that  the  English 
Church  was  reft  of  its  older  liberties  and  made  absolutely 
subservient  to  the  Crown.  It  was  a  parliamentary  statute 
that  defined  the  very  faith  and  religion  of  the  land.  The 
vastest  confiscation  of  landed  property  which  England  had 
ever  witnessed  was  wrought  by  Parliament.  It  regulated 
the  succession  to  the  throne.  It  decided  on  the  validity  of 
the  King's  marriages  and  the  legitimacy  of  the  King's 
children.  Former  sovereigns  had  struggled  against  the 
claim  of  the  Houses  to  meddle  with  the  royal  ministers  or 
with  members  of  the  royal  household.  Now  Parliament 
was  called  on  by  the  King  himself  to  attaint  his  ministers 
and  his  Queens. 

The  fearlessness  and  completeness  of  such  a  policy  as 
this  brings  home  to  us  more  than  any  other  of  his  plans 
the  genius  of  Cromwell.  But  its  success  depended  wholly 
on  the  absolute  servility  of  Parliament  to  the  will  of  the 
Crown,  and  Cromwell's  own  action  made  the  continuance 
of  such  a  servility  impossible.  The  part  which  the  Houses 
were  to  play  in  after  years  shows  the  importance  of  cling- 
ing to  the  forms  of  constitutional  freedom,  even  when 
their  life  is  all  but  lost.  In  the  inevitable  reaction  against 
tyranny  they  furnish  centres  for  the  reviving  energies  of 
the  people,  while  the  returning  tide  of  liberty  is  enabled 
through  their  preservation  to  flow  quietly  and  naturally 
along  its  traditional  channels.  And  even  before  Crom- 
well passed  to  his  doom  the  tide  of  liberty  was  returning. 
On  one  occasion  during  his  rule  a  "  great  debate"  on  the 
suppression  of  the  lesser  monasteries  showed  that  elements 
of  resistance  still  survived ;  and  these  elements  developed 
rapidly  as  the  power  of  the  Crown  declined  under  the 
minority  of  Edward  and  the  unpopularity  of  Mary.  To 
this  revival  of  a  spirit  of  independence  the  spoliation  of 
the  Church  largely  contributed.  Partly  from  necessity, 
partly  from  a  desire  to  build  up  a  faction  interested  in  the 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  205 

maintenance  of  their  ecclesiastical  policy,  Cromwell  and 
the  King  squandered  the  vast  mass  of  wealth  which  flowed 
into  the  Treasury  from  the  dissolution  of  the  monasteries 
with  reckless  prodigality.  Three  hundred  and  seventy- 
six  smaller  houses  had  been  suppressed  in  1536;  six  hun- 
dred and  forty-five  greater  houses  were  surrendered  or 
seized  in  1539.  Some  of  the  spoil  was  devoted  to  the  erec- 
tion of  six  new  bishoprics ;  a  larger  part  went  to  the  for- 
tification of  the  coast.  But  the  bulk  of  these  possessions 
were  granted  lavishly  away  to  the  nobles  and  courtiers 
about  the  King,  and  to  a  host  of  adventurers  who  "  had 
become  gospellers  for  the  abbey  lands."  Something  like 
a  fifth  of  the  actual  land  in  the  kingdom  was  in  this  way 
transferred  from  the  holding  of  the  Church  to  that  of  no- 
bles and  gentry.  Not  only  were  the  older  houses  enriched, 
but  a  new  aristocracy  was  erected  from  among  the  de- 
pendants of  the  Court.  The  Russells  and  the  Cavendishes 
are  familiar  instances  of  families  which  rose  from  obscu- 
rity through  the  enormous  grants  of  Church-land  made 
to  Henry's  courtiers.  The  old  baronage  was  thus  hardly 
crushed  before  a  new  aristocracy  took  its  place.  "  Those 
families  within  or  without  the  bounds  of  the  peerage," 
observes  Mr.  Hallam,  "  who  are  now  deemed  the  most  con- 
siderable, will  be  found,  with  no  great  number  of  excep- 
tions, to  have  first  become  conspicuous  under  the  Tudor 
line  of  kings  and,  if  we  could  trace  the  title  of  their  estates, 
to  have  acquired  no  small  portion  of  them  mediately  or 
immediately  from  monastic  or  other  ecclesiastical  founda- 
tions. "  The  leading  part  which  these  freshly  created  peers 
took  in  the  events  which  followed  Henry's  death  gave 
strength  and  vigor  to  the  whole  order.  But  the  smaller 
gentry  shared  in  the  general  enrichment  of  the  landed 
proprietors,  and  the  new  energy  of  the  Lords  was  soon 
followed  by  a  display  of  political  independence  among  the 
Commons  themselves. 

While  the  prodigality  of  Cromwell's  system  thus  brought 
into  being  a  new  check  upon  the  Crown  by  enriching  tho 


206  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

nobles  and  the  lesser  gentry,  the  religious  changes  it 
brought  about  gave  fire  and  vigor  to  the  elements  of  oppo- 
sition which  were  slowly  gathering.  What  did  most  to 
ruin  the  King-worship  that  Cromwell  set  up  was  Crom- 
well's ecclesiastical  policy.  In  reducing  the  Church  to 
mere  slavery  beneath  the  royal  power  he  believed  himself 
to  be  trampling  down  the  last  constitutional  force  which 
could  hold  the  Monarchy  in  check.  What  he  really  "did 
was  to  give  life  and  energy  to  new  forces  which  were 
bound  from  their  very  nature  to  battle  with  the  Monarchy 
for  even  more  than  the  old  English  freedom.  When 
Cromwell  seized  on  the  Church  he  held  himself  to  be  seiz- 
ing for  the  Crown  the  mastery  which  the  Church  had 
wielded  till  now  over  the  consciences  and  reverence  of 
men.  But  the  very  humiliation  of  the  great  religious 
body  broke  the  spell  beneath  which  Englishmen  had 
bowed.  In  form  nothing  had  been  changed.  The  outer 
constitution  of  the  Church  remained  utterly  unaltered. 
The  English  bishop,  freed  from  the  papal  control,  freed 
from  the  check  of  monastic  independence,  seemed  greater 
and  more  imposing  than  ever.  The  priest  still  clung  to 
rectory  and  church.  If  images  were  taken  out  of  churches, 
if  here  and  there  a  rood-loft  was  pulled  down  or  a  saint's 
shrine  demolished,  no  change  was  made  in  form  of  ritual 
or  mode  of  worship.  The  mass  was  untouched.  Every 
hymn,  every  prayer  was  still  in  Latin;  confession,  pen- 
ance, fastings  and  f eastings,  extreme  unction,  went  on  as 
before.  There  was  little  to  show  that  any  change  had 
taken  place;  and  yet  every  ploughman  felt  that  all  was 
changed.  The  bishop,  gorgeous  as  he  might  be  in  mitre 
and  cope,  was  a  mere  tool  of  the  King.  The  priest  was 
trembling  before  heretics  he  used  to  burn.  Farmer  or 
shopkeeper  might  enter  their  church  any  Sunday  morning 
to  find  mass  or  service  utterly  transformed.  The  spell  of 
tradition,  of  unbroken  continuance,  was  over ;  and  with  it 
the  power  which  the  Church  had  wielded  over  the  souls  of 
men  was  in  great  part  done  away. 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  207 

It  was  not  that  the  new  Protestantism  was  as  yet  for- 
midable, for,  violent  and  daring  as  they  were,  the  adherents 
of  Luther  were  few  in  number,  and  drawn  mostly  from 
the  poorer  classes  among  whom  Wyclifite  heresy  had  lin- 
gered or  from  the  class  of  scholars  whose  theological  studies 
drew  their  sympathy  to  the  movement  over  sea.  It  was 
that  the  lump  was  now  ready  to  be  leavened  by  this  petty 
leaven,  that  men's  hold  on  the  firm  ground  of  custom  was 
broken  and  their  minds  set  drifting  and  questioning,  that 
little  as  was  the  actual  religious  change,  the  thought  of 
religious  change  had  become  familiar  to  the  people  as  a 
whole.  And  with  religious  change  was  certain  to  come 
religious  revolt.  The  human  conscience  was  hardly  likely 
to  move  everywhere  in  strict  time  to  the  slow  advance  of 
Henry's  reforms.  Men  who  had  been  roused  from  im- 
plicit obedience  to  the  Papacy  as  a  revelation  of  the  Divine 
will  by  hearing  the  Pope  denounced  in  royal  proclamations 
as  a  usurper  and  an  impostor  were  hardly  inclined  to  take 
up  submissively  the  new  official  doctrine  which  substituted 
implicit  belief  in  the  King  for  implicit  belief  in  the 
"Bishop  of  Rome."  But  bound  as  Church  and  King  now 
were  together,  it  was  impossible  to  deny  a  tenet  of  the  one 
without  entering  on  a  course  of  opposition  to  the  other. 
Cromwell  had  raised  against  the  Monarchy  the  most  fatal 
of  all  enemies,  the  force  of  the  individual  conscience,  the 
enthusiasm  of  religious  belief,  the  fire  of  religious  fanati- 
cism. Slowly  as  the  area  of  the  new  Protestantism  ex- 
tended, every  man  that  it  gained  was  a  possible  opponent 
of  the  Crown.  And  should  the  time  come,  as  the  time 
was  soon  to  come,  when  the  Crown  moved  to  the  side  of 
Protestantism,  then  in  turn  every  soul  that  the  older  faith 
retained  was  pledged  to  a  lifelong  combat  with  the 
Monarchy. 

How  irresistible  was  the  national  drift  was  seen*  on 
Cromwell's  fall.  Its  first  result  indeed  promised  to  be  a 
reversal  of  all  that  Cromwell  had  done.  Norfolk  returned 
to  power,  and  his  influence  over  Henry  seemed  secured  by 


208  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

the  King's  repudiation  of  Anne  of  Cleves  and  his  marriage 
in  the  summer  of  1540  to  a  niece  of  the  Duke,  Catharine 
Howard.  But  Norfolk's  temper  had  now  become  wholly 
hostile  to  the  movement  about  him.  "  I  never  read  the 
Scripture  nor  never  will!"  the  Duke  replied  hotly  to  a 
Protestant  arguer.  "  It  was  merry  in  England  afore  the 
new  learning  came  up;  yea,  I  would  all  things  were  as 
hath  been  in  times  past."  In  his  preference  of  an  Impe- 
rial alliance  to  an  alliance  with  Francis  and  the  Lutherans 
Henry  went  warmly  with  his  minister.  Parted  as  he  had 
been  from  Charles  by  the  question  of  the  divorce,  the 
King's  sympathies  had  remained  true  to  the  Emperor; 
and  at  this  moment  he  was  embittered  against  France  by 
the  difficulties  it  threw  in  the  way  of  his  projects  for  gain- 
ing a  hold  upon  Scotland.  Above  all  the  King  still  clung 
to  the  hope  of  a  purification  of  the  Church  by  a  Council, 
as  well  as  of  a  reconciliation  of  England  with  the  general 
body  of  this  purified  Christendom,  and  it  was  only  by  the 
Emperor  that  such  a  Council  could  be  convened  or  such  a 
reconciliation  brought  about.  An  alliance  with  him  was 
far  from  indicating  any  retreat  from  Henry's  position  of 
independence  or  any  submission  to  the  Papacy.  To  the 
men  of  his  own  day  Charles  seemed  no  Catholic  bigot. 
On  the  contrary  the  stricter  representatives  of  Catholicism 
such  as  Paul  the  Fourth  denounced  him  as  a  patron  of  her- 
etics, and  attributed  the  upgrowth  of  Lutheranism  to  his 
steady  protection  and  encouragement.  Nor  was  the  charge 
without  seeming  justification.  The  old  jealousy  between 
Pope  and  Emperor,  the  more  recent  hostility  between 
them  as  rival  Italian  powers,  had  from  the  beginning 
proved  Luther's  security.  At  the  first  appearance  of  the 
reformer  Maximilian  had  recommended  the  Elector  of 
Saxony  to  suffer  no  harm  to  be  done  to  him ;  "  there  might 
come  a  time,"  said  the  old  Emperor,  "when  he  would  be 
needed."  Charles  had  looked  on  the  matter  mainly  in  the 
same  political  way.  In  his  earliest  years  he  bought  Leo's 
aid  in  his  recovery  of  Milan  from  the  French  king  by 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  209 

issuing  the  ban  of  the  Empire  against  Luther  in  the  Diet 
of  Worms ;  but  every  Italian  held  that  in  suffering  the  re- 
former to  withdraw  unharmed  Charles  had  shown  not  so 
much  regard  to  his  own  safe-conduct  as  a  purpose  still  "  to 
keep  the  Pope  in  check  with  that  rein."  And  as  Charles 
dealt  with  Luther  so  he  dealt  with  Lutheranism.  The 
new  faith  profited  by  the  Emperor's  struggle  with  Clement 
the  Seventh  for  the  lordship  over  Italy.  It  was  in  the 
midst  of  this  struggle  that  his  brother  and  representative, 
Ferdinand,  signed  in  the  Diet  of  Spires  an  Imperial  decree 
by  which  the  German  States  were  left  free  to  arrange  their 
religious  affairs  "  as  each  should  best  answer  to  God  and 
the  Emperor."  The  decree  gave  a  legal  existence  to  the 
Protestant  body  in  the  Empire  which  it  never  afterward 
lost. 

Such  a  step  might  well  encourage  the  belief  that  Charles 
was  himself  inclining  to  Lutheranism;  and  the  belief 
gathered  strength  as  he  sent  Lutheran  armies  over  the 
Alps  to  sack  Rome  and  to  hold  the  Pope  a  prisoner.  The 
belief  was  a  false  one,  for  Charles  remained  utterly  un- 
touched by  the  religious  movement  about  him ;  but  even 
when  his  strife  with  the  Papacy  was  to  a  great  extent 
lulled  by  Clement's  submission,  he  still  turned  a  deaf  ear 
to  the  Papal  appeals  for  dealing  with  Lutheranism  by  fire 
and  sword.  His  political  interests  and  the  conception 
which  he  held  of  his  duty  as  Emperor  alike  swayed  him 
to  milder  counsels.  He  purposed  indeed  to  restore  relig- 
ious unity.  His  political  aim  was  to  bring  Germany  to 
his  feet  as  he  had  brought  Italy ;  and  he  saw  that  the  relig- 
ious schism  was  the  great  obstacle  in  the  way  of  his  real- 
izing this  design.  As  the  temporal  head  of  the  Catholic 
world  he  was  still  more  strongly  bent  to  heal  the  breaches 
of  Catholicism.  But  he  had  no  wish  to  insist  on  an  un- 
conditional submission  to  the  Papacy.  He  believed  that 
there  were  evils  to  be  cured  on  the  one  side  as  on  the 
other ;  and  Charles  saw.  the  high  position  which  awaited 
him  if  as  Emperor  he  could  bring  about  a  reformation  of 


210  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  Vt 

the  Church  and  a  reunion  of  Christendom.  Violent  as 
Luther's  words  had  been,  the  Lutheran  princes  and  the 
bulk  of  Lutheran  theologians  had  not  yet  come  to  look  on 
Catholicism  as  an  irreconcilable  foe.  Even  on  the  papal 
side  there  was  a  learned  and  active  party,  a  party  headed 
by  Contarini  and  Pole,  whose  theological  sympathies  went 
in  many  points  with  the  Lutherans,  and  who  looked  to  the 
winning  back  of  the  Lutherans  as  the  needful  prelude  to 
any  reform  in  the  doctrine  and  practice  of  the  Church ; 
while  Melancthon  was  as  hopeful  as  Contarini  that  such  a 
reform  might  be  wrought  and  the  Church  again  become 
universal.  In  his  proposal  of  a  Council  to  carry  on  the 
double  work  of  purification  and  reunion  therefore  Charles 
stood  out  as  the  representative  of  the  larger  part  both  of 
the  Catholic  and  the  Protestant  world.  Against  such  a 
proposal  however  Rome  struggled  hard.  All  her  tradition 
was  against  Councils,  where  the  assembled  bishops  had  in 
earlier  days  asserted  their  superiority  to  the  Pope,  and 
where  the  Emperor  who  convened  the  assembly  and  car- 
ried out  its  decrees  rose  into  dangerous  rivalry  with  the 
Papacy.  Crushed  as  he  was,  Clement  the  Seventh 
throughout  his  lifetime  held  the  proposal  of  a  Council 
stubbornly  at  bay.  But  under  his  successor,  Paul  the 
Third,  the  influence  of  Contarini  and  the  moderate  Catho- 
lics secured  a  more  favorable  reception  of  plans  of  recon- 
ciliation. In  April,  1541,  conferences  for  this  purpose 
were  in  fact  opened  at  Augsburg  in  which  Contarini,  as 
Papal  legate,  accepted  a  definition  of  the  moot  question  of 
justification  by  faith  which  satisfied  Bucer  and  Melanc- 
thon. On  the  other  side,  the  Landgrave  of  Hesse  and  the 
Elector  of  Brandenburg  publicly  declared  that  they  be- 
lieved it  possible  to  come  to  terms  on  the  yet  more  vexed 
questions  of  the  Mass  and  the  Papal  supremacy. 

Never  had  the  reunion  of  the  world  seemed  so  near;  and 
the  hopes  that  were  stirring  found  an  echo  in  England  as 
well  as  in  Germany.  We  can  hardly  doubt  indeed  that  it 
was  the  revival  of  these  hopes  which  had  brought  about 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  211 

the  fall  of  Cromwell  and  the  recall  of  Norfolk  to  power. 
Norfolk,  like  his  master,  looked  to  a  purification  of  the 
Church  by  a  Council  as  the  prelude  to  a  reconciliation  of 
England  with  the  general  body  of  Catholicism ;  and  both 
saw  that  it  was  by  the  influence  of  the  Emperor  alone  that 
such  a  Council  could  be  brought  about.  Charles  on  the 
other  hand  was  ready  to  welcome  Henry's  advances.  The 
quarrel  over  Catharine  had  ended  with  her  death ;  and  the 
wrong  done  her  had  been  in  part  atoned  for  by  the  fall  of 
Anne  Boleyn.  The  aid  of  Henry  too  was  needed  to  hold 
in  check  the  opposition  of  France.  The  chief  means 
which  France  still  possessed  of  holding  the  Emperor  at 
bay  lay  in  the  disunion  of  the  Empire,  and  it  was  resolute 
to  preserve  this  weapon  against  him  at  whatever  cost 
to  Christendom.  While  Francis  remonstrated  at  Rome 
against  the  concessions  made  to  the  Lutherans  by  the 
Legates,  he  urged  the  Lutheran  princes  to  make  no  terms 
with  the  Papacy.  To  the  Protestants  he  held  out  hopes 
of  his  own  conversion,  while  he  promised  Pope  Paul  that 
he  would  defend  him  with  his  life  against  Emperor  and 
heretics.  His  intrigues  were  aided  by  the  suspicions  of 
both  the  religious  parties.  Luther  refused  to  believe  in 
the  sincerity  of  the  concessions  made  by  the  Legates ;  Paul 
the  Third  held  aloof  from  them  in  sullen  silence.  Mean- 
while Francis  was  preparing  to  raise  more  material  obsta- 
cles to  the  Emperor's  designs.  Charles  had  bought  his 
last  reconciliation  with  the  King  by  a  promise  of  restoring 
the  Milanese,  but  he  had  no  serious  purpose  of  ever  fulfil- 
ling his  pledge,  and  his  retention  of  the  Duchy  gave  the 
French  King  a  fair  pretext  for  threatening  a  renewal  of 
the  war. 

England,  as  Francis  hoped,  he  could  hold  in  check 
through  his  alliance  with  the  Scots.  After  the  final  ex- 
pulsion of  Albany  in  1524  Scottish  history  became  little 
more  than  a  strife  between  Margaret  Tudor  and  her  hus- 
band, the  Earl  of  Angus,  for  power;  but  the  growth  of 
James  Uhe  Fifth  to  manhood  at  last  secured  rest  for  the 


212  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI 

land.  James  had  all  the  varied  ability  of  his  race,  and  he 
carried  out  with  vigor  its  traditional  policy.  The  High- 
land chieftains,  the  great  lords  of  the  Lowlands,  were 
brought  more  under  the  royal  sway;  the  Church  was 
strengthened  to  serve  as  a  check  on  the  feudal  baronage ; 
the  alliance  with  France  was  strictly  preserved,  as  the  one 
security  against  English  aggression.  Nephew  as  he  was 
indeed  of  the  English  King,  James  from  the  outset  of  his 
reign  took  up  an  attitude  hostile  to  England.  He  was 
jealous  of  the  influence  which  the  two  Henries  had  estab- 
lished in  his  realm  by  the  marriage  of  Margaret  and  by 
the  building  up  of  an  English  party  under  the  Douglases ; 
the  great  Churchmen  who  formed  his  most  trusted  advisers 
dreaded  the  influence  of  the  religious  changes  across  the 
border ;  while  the  people  clung  to  their  old  hatred  of  Eng- 
land and  their  old  dependence  on  France.  It  was  only  by 
two  inroads  of  the  border  lords  that  Henry  checked  the 
hostile  intrigues  of  James  in  1532;  his  efforts  to  influence 
his  nephew  by  an  interview  and  alliance  were  met  by  the 
King's  marriage  with  two  French  wives  in  succession, 
Magdalen  of  Valois,  a  daughter  of  Francis,  and  Mary,  a 
daughter  of  the  Duke  of  Guise.  In  1539  when  the  pro- 
jected coalition  between  France  and  the  Empire  threatened 
England,  it  had  been  needful  to  send  Norfolk  with  an 
army  to  the  Scotch  -  frontier,  and  now  that  France  was 
again  hostile  Norfolk  had  to  move  anew  to  the  border  in 
the  autumn  of  1541. 

While  the  Duke  was  fruitlessly  endeavoring  to  bring 
James  to  fresh  friendship  a  sudden  blow  at  home  weakened 
his  power.  At  the  close  of  the  year  Catharine  Howard 
was  arrested  on  a  charge  of  adultery ;  a  Parliament  which 
assembled  in  January,  1542,  passed  a  Bill  of  Attainder; 
and  in  February  the  Queen  was  sent  to  the  block.  She 
was  replaced  by  the  widow  of  Lord  Latimer,  Catharine 
Parr;  and  the  influence  of  Norfolk  in  the  King's  counsels 
gradually  gave  way  to  that  of  Bishop  Gardiner  of  Win- 
chester. But  Henry  clung  to  the  policy  which  the  Duke 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  213 

favored.  At  the  end  of  1541  two  great  calamities,  the  loss 
of  Hungary  after  a  victory  of  the  Turks  and  a  crushing 
defeat  at  Algiers,  so  weakened  Charles  that  in  the  summer 
of  the  following  year  Francis  ventured  to  attack  him. 
The  attack  served  only  to  draw  closer  the  negotiations  be- 
tween England  and  the  Emperor;  and  Francis  was  forced, 
as  he  had  threatened,  to  give  Henry  work  to  occupy  him 
at  home.  The  busiest  counsellor  of  the  Scotch  King, 
Cardinal  Beaton,  crossed  the  seas  to  negotiate  a  joint  at- 
tack, and  the  attitude  of  Scotland  became  so  menacing 
that  in  the  autumn  of  1542  Norfolk  was  again  sent  to  the 
border  with  twenty  thousand  men.  But  terrible  as  were 
his  ravages,  he  could  not  bring  the  Scotch  army  to  an  en- 
gagement, and  want  of  supplies  soon  forced  him  to  fall 
back  over  the  border.  It  was  in  vain  that  James  urged 
his  nobles  to  follow  him  in  a  counter-invasion.  They 
were  ready  to  defend  their  country ;  but  the  memory  of 
Flodden  was  still  fresh,  and  success  in  England  would 
only  give  dangerous  strength  to  a  King  in  whom  they 
saw  an  enemy.  But  James  was  as  stubborn  in  his  pur- 
pose as  the  lords.  Anxious  only  to  free  himself  from  their 
presence,  he  waited  till  the  two  armies  had  alike  with- 
drawn, and  then  suddenly  summoned  his  subjects  to  meet 
him  in  arms  on  the  western  border.  A  disorderly  host 
gathered  at  Lochmaben  and  passed  into  Cumberland ;  but 
the  English  borderers  followed  on  them  fast,  and  were 
preparing  to  attack  when  at  nightfall  on  the  twenty-fifth 
of  November  a  panic  seized  the  whole  Scotch  force.  Lost 
in  the  darkness  and  cut  off  from  retreat  by  the  Solway 
Firth,  thousands  of  men  with  all  the  baggage  and  guns 
fell  into  the  hands  of  the  pursuers.  The  news  of  this  rout 
fell  on  the  young  King  like  a  sentence  of  death.  For  a 
while  he  wandered  desperately  from  palace  to  palace  till  at 
the  opening  of  December  the  tidings  met  him  at  Falkirk 
that  his  queen,  Mary  of  Guise,  had  given  birth  to  a  child. 
His  two  boys  had  both  died  in  youth,  and  he  was  longing 
passionately  for  an  heir  to  the  crown  which  was  slipping 


214  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

from  his  grasp.  But  the  child  was  a  daughter,  the  Mary 
Stuart  of  later  history.  "The  deil  go  with  it,"  muttered 
the  dying  king,  as  his  mind  fell  back  to  the  close  of  the 
line  of  Bruce  and  the  marriage  with  Robert's  daughter 
which  brought  the  Stuarts  to  the  Scottish  throne.  "  The 
deil  go  with  it!  It  will  end  as  it  began.  It  came  with  a 
lass,  and  it  will  end  with  a  lass."  A  few  days  later  he 
died. 

The  death  of  James  did  more  than  remove  a  formidable 
foe.  It  opened  up  for  the  first  time  a  prospect  of  that 
union  of  the  two  kingdoms  which  was  at  last  to  close  their 
long  hostility.  Scotland,  torn  by  factions  and  with  a  babe 
for  queen,  seemed  to  lie  at  Henry's  feet :  and  the  King 
seized  the  opportunity  of  completing  his  father's  work  by 
a  union  of  the  realms.  At  the  opening  of  1543  he  proposed 
to  the  Scotch  regent,  the  Earl  of  Arran,  the  marriage  of 
the  infant  Mary  Stuart  with  his  son  Edward.  To  insure 
this  bridal  he  demanded  that  Mary  should  at  once  be  sent 
to  England,  the  four  great  fortresses  of  Scotland  be  placed 
in  English  hands,  and  a  voice  given  to  Henry  himself  in 
the  administration  of  the  Scotch  Council  of  Regency. 
Arran  and  the  Queen-mother,  rivals  as  they  were,  vied 
with  each  other  in  apparent  good  will  to  the  marriage ; 
but  there  was  a  steady  refusal  to  break  the  league  with 
France,  and  the  "English  lords,"  as  the  Douglas  faction 
were  called,  owned  themselves  helpless  in  face  of  the  na- 
tional jealousy  of  English  ambition.  The  temper  of  the 
nation  itself  was  seen  in  the  answer  made  by  the  Scotch 
Parliament  which  gathered  in  the  spring.  If  they  con- 
sented to  the  young  Queen's  betrothal,  they  not  only  re- 
jected the  demands  which  accompanied  the  proposal,  but 
insisted  that  in  case  of  such  a  union  Scotland  should  have 
a  perpetual  regent  of  its  own,  and  that  this  office  should 
be  hereditary  in  the  House  of  Arran.  Warned  by  his 
very  partisans  that  the  delivery  of  Mary  was  impossible, 
that  if  such  a  demand  were  pressed  "  there  was  not  so  little 
a  boy  but  he  would  hurl  stones  against  it,  the  wives  would 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  215 

handle  their  distaffs,  and  the  commons  would  universally 
die  in  it,"  Henry's  proposals  dropped  in  July  to  a  treaty 
of  alliance,  offensive  and  defensive,  he  suffered  France  to 
be  included  among  the  allies  of  Scotland  named  in  it,  he 
consented  that  the  young  Queen  should  remain  with  her 
mother  till  the  age  of  ten,  and  offered  guarantees  for  the 
maintenance  of  Scotch  independence. 

But  modify  it  as  he  might,  Henry  knew  that  such  a 
project  of  union  could  only  be  carried  out  by  a  war  with 
Francis.  His  negotiations  for  a  treaty  with  Charles  had 
long  been  delayed  through  Henry's  wish  to  drag  the  Em- 
peror into  an  open  breach  with  the  Papacy,  but  at  the  mo- 
ment of  the  King's  first  proposals  for  the  marriage  of  Mary 
Stuart  with  his  son  the  need  of  finding  a  check  upon  France 
forced  on  a  formal  alliance  with  the  Emperor  in  February, 
1543.  The  two  allies  agreed  that  the  war  should  be  con- 
tinued till  the  Duchy  of  Burgundy  had  been  restored  to 
the  Emperor  and  till  England  had  recovered  Normandy 
and  Guienne ;  while  the  joint  fleets  of  Henry  and  Charles 
held  the  Channel  and  sheltered  England  from  any  danger 
of  French  attack.  The  main  end  of  this  treaty  was  doubt- 
less to  give  Francis  work  at  home  which  might  prevent 
the  dispatch  of  a  French  force  into  Scotland  and  the  over- 
throw of  Henry's  hopes  of  a  Scotch  marriage.  These 
hopes  were  strengthened  as  the  summer  went  on  by  the 
acceptance  of  his  later  proposals  in  a  Parliament  which 
was  packed  by  the  Regent,  and  by  the  actual  conclusion 
of  a  marriage  treaty.  But  if  Francis  could  spare  neither 
horse  nor  man  for  action  in  Scotland  his  influence  in  the 
northern  kingdom  was  strong  enough  to  foil  Henry's  plans. 
The  Churchmen  were  as  bitterly  opposed  to  such  a  marriage 
as  the  partisans  of  France;  and  their  head,  Cardinal 
Beaton,  who  had  held  aloof  from  the  Regent's  Parliament, 
suddenly  seized  the  Queen-mother  and  her  babe,  crowned 
the  infant  Mary,  called  a  Parliament  in  December  which 
annulled  the  marriage  treaty,  and  set  Henry  at  defiance. 

The  King's  wrath  at  this  overthrow  of  his  hopes  showed 

AO  VOL.  5 


216  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

itself  in  a  brutal  and  impolitic  act  of  vengeance.  He  was 
a  skilful  shipbuilder;  and  among  the  many  enterprises 
which  the  restless  genius  of  Cromwell  undertook  there  was 
probably  none  in  which  Henry  took  so  keen  an  interest  as 
in  his  creation  of  an  English  fleet.  Hitherto  merchant 
ships  had  been  impressed  when  a  fleet  was  needed;  but 
the  progress  of  naval  warfare  had  made  the  maintenance 
of  an  armed  force  at  sea  a  condition  of  maritime  power, 
and  the  resources  furnished  by  the  dissolution  of  the  ab- 
beys had  been  devoted  in  part  to  the  building  of  ships  of 
war,  the  largest  of  which,  the  Mary  Rose,  carried  a  crew 
of  seven  hundred  men.  The  new  strength  which  England 
was  to  wield  in  its  navy  was  first  seen  in  1544.  An  army 
was  gathered  under  Lord  Hertford;  and  while  Scotland 
was  looking  for  the  usual  advance  over  the  border  the 
Earl's  forces  were  quietly  put  on  board  and  the  English 
fleet  appeared  on  the  third  of  May  in  the  Frith  of  Forth. 
The  surprise  made  resistance  impossible.  Leith  was  seized 
and  sacked;  Edinburgh,  then  a  town  of  wooden  houses, 
was  given  to  the  flames,  and  burned  for  three  days  and 
three  nights.  The  country  for  seven  miles  round  was 
harried  into  a  desert.  The  blow  was  a  hard  one,  but  it 
was  little  likely  to  bring  Scotchmen  round  to  Henry's 
projects  of  union.  A  brutal  raid  of  the  English  borderers 
on  Melrose  and  the  destruction  of  his  ancestors'  tombs  es- 
tranged the  Earl  of  Angus,  and  was  quickly  avenged  by 
his  overthrow  of  the  marauders  at  Ancrum  Moor.  Henry 
had  yet  to  learn  the  uselessness  of  mere  force  to  compass 
his  ends.  "  I  shall  be  glad  to  serve  the  King  of  England, 
with  my  honor,"  said  the  Lord  of  Buccleugh  to  an  Eng- 
lish envoy,  "  but  I  will  not  be  constrained  thereto  if  all 
Teviotdale  be  burned  to  the  bottom  of  hell." 

Hertford's  force  returned  in  good  time  to  join  the  army 
which  Henry  in  person  was  gathering  at  Calais  to  co-oper- 
ate with  the  forces  assembled  by  Charles  on  the  north- 
eastern frontier  of  France.  Each  sovereign  found  himself 
at  the  head  of  forty  thousand  men,  and  the  Emperor's 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  217 

military  ability  was  seen  in  his  proposal  for  an  advance  of 
both  armies  upon  Paris.  But  though  Henry  found  no 
French  force  in  his  front,  his  cautious  temper  shrank  from 
the  risk  of  leaving  fortresses  in  his  rear ;  and  while  their 
allies  pushed  boldly  past  Chalons  on  the  capital,  the  Eng- 
lish troops  were  detained  till  September  in  the  capture  of 
Boulogne,  and  only  left  Boulogne  to  form  the  siege  of 
Montreuil.  The  French  were  thus  enabled  to  throw  then 
whole  force  on  the  Emperor,  and  Charles  found  himself  in 
a  position  from  which  negotiation  alone  could  extricate 
him. 

His  ends  were  in  fact  gained  by  the  humiliation  of 
France,  and  he  had  as  little  desire  to  give  England  a 
strong  foothold  in  the  neighborhood  of  his  own  Nether- 
lands as  in  Wolsey's  days.  The  widening  of  English  ter- 
ritory there  could  hardly  fail  to  encourage  that  upgrowth 
of  heresy  which' the  Emperor  justly  looked  upon  as  the 
greatest  danger  to  the  hold  of  Spain  upon  the  Low  Coun- 
tries, while  it  would  bring  Henry  a  step  nearer  to  the  chain 
of  Protestant  states  which  began  on  the  Lower  Rhine. 
The  plans  which  Charles  had  formed  for  uniting  the  Cath- 
olics and  Lutherans  in  the  conferences  of  Augsburg  had 
broken  down  before  the  opposition  both  of  Luther  and  the 
Pope.  On  both  sides  indeed  the  religious  contest  was 
gathering  new  violence.  A  revival  had  begun  in  the 
Church  itself,  but  it  was  the  revival  of  a  militant  and  un- 
compromising orthodoxy.  In  1542  the  fanaticism  of  Car- 
dinal Caraffa  forced  on  the  establishment  of  a  supreme 
Tribunal  of  the  Inquisition  at  Rome.  The  next  year  saw 
the  establishment  of  the  Jesuits.  Meanwhile  Lutheran- 
ism  took  a  new  energy.  The  whole  north  of  Germany  be- 
came Protestant.  In  1539  the  younger  branches  of  the 
house  of  Saxony  joined  the  elder  in  a  common  adherence 
to  Lutheranism ;  and  their  conversion  had  been  followed 
by  that  of  the  Elector  of  Brandenburg.  Southern  Ger- 
many seemed  bent  on  following  the  example  of  the  north. 
The  hereditary  possessions  of  Charles  himself  fell  away 


218  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

from  Catholicism.  The  Austrian  duchies  were  overrun 
with  heresy.  Bohemia  promised  soon  to  become  Hussite 
again.  Persecution  failed  to  check  the  triumph  of  the  new 
opinions  in  the  Low  Countries.  The  Empire  itself  threat- 
ened to  become  Protestant.  In  1540  the  accession  of  the 
Elector  Palatine  robbed  Catholicism  of  Central  Germany 
and  the  Upper  Rhine ;  and  three  years  later,  at  the  open- 
ing of  the  war  with  France,  that  of  the  Archbishop  of 
Koln  gave  the  Protestants  not  only  the  Central  Rhineland 
but  a  majority  in  the  College  of  Electors.  It  seemed  im- 
possible for  Charles  to  prevent  the  Empire  from  repudiat- 
ing Catholicism  in  his  lifetime,  or  to  hinder  the  Imperial 
Crown  from  falling  to  a  Protestant  at  his  death. 

The  great  fabric  of  power  which  had  been  built  up  by 
the  policy  of  Ferdinand  of  Aragon  was  thus  threatened 
with  utter  ruin,  and  Charles  saw  himself  forced  into  the 
struggle  he  had  so  long  avoided,  if  not  for  the  interests  of 
religion,  at  any  rate  for  the  interests  of  the  House  of  Aus- 
tria. He  still  hoped  for  a  reunion  from  the  Council  which 
was  assembled  at  Trent,  and  from  which  a  purified  Cath- 
olicism was  to  come.  But  he  no  longer  hoped  that  the 
Lutherans  would  yield  to  the  mere  voice  of  the  Council. 
They  would  yield  only  to  force,  and  the  first  step  in  such 
a  process  of  compulsion  must  be  the  breaking  up  of  their 
League  of  Schmalkald.  Only  France  could  save  them; 
and  it  was  to  isolate  them  from  France  that  Charles  availed 
himself  of  the  terror  his  march  on  Paris  had  caused,  and 
concluded  a  treaty  with  that  power  in  September,  1544. 
The  progress  of  Protestantism  had  startled  even  France 
itself ;  and  her  old  policy  seemed  to  be  abandoned  in  her 
promises  of  co-operation  in  the  task  of  repressing  heresy  in 
the  Empire.  But  a  stronger  security  against  French  in- 
tervention lay  in  the  unscrupulous  dexterity  with  which, 
while  withdrawing  from  the  struggle,  Charles  left  Henry 
and  Francis  still  at  strife.  Henry  would  not  cede  Bou- 
logne, and  Francis  saw  no  means  of  forcing  him  to  a  peace 
save  by  a  threat  of  invasion.  While  an  army  closed  round 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540--1608.  219 

Boulogne,  and  a  squadron  carried  troops  to  Scotland,  a 
hundred  and  fifty  French  ships  were  gathered  in  the  Chan- 
nel and  crossed  in  the  summer  of  1545  to  the  Isle  of  Wight. 
But  their  attacks  were  feebly  conducted,  and  the  fleet  at 
last  returned  to  its  harbors  without  striking  any  serious 
blow,  while  the  siege  of  Boulogne  dragged  idly  on  through 
the  year.  Both  kings  however  drew  to  peace.  In  spite  of 
the  treaty  of  Crepy  it  was  impossible  for  France  to  abandon 
the  Lutherans,  and  Francis  was  eager  to  free  his  hands 
for  action  across  the  Rhine.  Henry,  on  the  other  hand,  de- 
serted by  his  ally  and  with  a  treasury  ruined  by  the  cost  of 
the  war,  was  ready  at  last  to  surrender  his  gains  in  it.  In 
June,  1546,  a  peace  was  concluded  by  which  England  en- 
gaged to  surrender  Boulogne  on  payment  of  a  heavy  ran- 
som, and  France  to  restore  the  annual  subsidy  which  had 
been  promised  in  1525. 

What  aided  in  the  close  of  the  war  was  a  new  aspect  of 
affairs  in  Scotland.  Since  the  death  of  James  the  Fifth 
the  great  foe  of  England  in  the  north  had  been  the  Arch- 
bishop of  St.  Andrews,  Cardinal  Beaton.  In  despair  of 
shaking  his  power  his  rivals  had  proposed  schemes  for  his 
assassination  to  Henry,  and  these  schemes  had  been  ex- 
pressly approved.  But  plot  after  plot  broke  down ;  and  it 
was  not  till  May,  1546,  that  a  group  of  Scotch  nobles  who 
favored  the  Reformation  surprised  his  castle  at  St.  An- 
drews. Shrieking  miserably,  "  I  am  a  priest !  I  am  a 
priest !  Fie !  Fie !  All  is  gone !"  the  Cardinal  was  brutally 
murdered,  and  his  body  hung  over  the  castle  walls.  His 
death  made  it  easy  to  include  Scotland  in  the  peace  with 
France  which  was  concluded  in  the  summer.  But  in 
England  itself  peace  was  a  necessity.  The  Crown  was 
penniless.  In  spite  of  the  confiscation  of  the  abbey  lands 
in  1539  the  treasury  was  found  empty  at  the  very  opening 
of  the  war :  the  large  subsidies  granted  by  the  parliament 
were  expended;  and  conscious  that  a  fresh  grant  could 
hardly  be  expected  even  from  the  servile  Houses  the  gov- 
ernment in  1545  fell  back  on  its  old  resource  of  benevo- 


820  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI 

lences.  Of  two  London  merchants  who  resisted  this 
demand  as  illegal,  one  was  sent  to  the  Fleet,  the  second 
ordered  to  join  the  army  on  the  Scotch  border;  but  it  was 
significant  that  resistance  had  been  offered,  and  the  failure 
of  the  war-taxes  which  were  voted  at  the  close  of  the  year 
to  supply  the  royal  needs  drove  the  Council  to  fresh  acts 
of  confiscation.  A  vast  mass  of  Church  property  still  re- 
mained for  the  spoiler,  and  by  a  bill  of  1545  more  than 
two  thousand  chantries  and  chapels,  with  a  hundred  and 
ten  hospitals,  were  suppressed  to  the  profit  of  the  Crown. 
Enormous  as  this  booty  was,  it  could  only  be  slowly  real- 
ized; and  the  immediate  pressure  forced  the  Council  to 
take  refuge  in  the  last  and  worst  measure  any  government 
can  adopt,  a  debasement  of  the  currency.  The  evils  of 
such  a  course  were  felt  till  the  reign  of  Elizabeth.  But  it 
was  a  course  that  could  not  be  repeated ;  and  financial  ex- 
haustion played  its  part  in  bringing  the  war  to  an  end. 

A  still  greater  part  was  played  by  the  aspect  of  affairs 
in  the  Empire.  Once  freed  from  the  check  of  the  war 
Charles  had  moved  fast  to  his  aim.  In  1545  he  had  ad- 
justed all  minor  differences  with  Paul  the  Third,  and  Pope 
and  Emperor  had  resolved  on  the  immediate  convocation 
of  the  Council,  and  on  the  enforcement  of  its  decisions  by 
weight  of  arms.  Should  the  Emperor  be  driven  to  war 
with  the  Lutheran  princes,  the  Pope  engaged  to  support 
him  with  all  his  power.  "  Were  it  needful, "  Paul  promised, 
"he  would  sell  his  very  crown  in  his  service."  In  De- 
cember the  Council  was  actually  opened  at  Trent,  and  its 
proceedings  soon  showed  that  no  concessions  to  the  Luther- 
ans could  be  looked  for.  The  Emperor's  demand  that  the 
reform  of  the  Church  should  first  be  taken  in  hand  was 
evaded ;  and  on  the  two  great  questions  of  the  authority 
of  the  Bible  as  a  ground  of  faith,  and  of  justification,  the 
sentence  of  the  Council  directly  condemned  the  Protestant 
opinions.  The  Lutherans  showed  their  resolve  to  make 
no  submission  by  refusing  to  send  representatives  to  Trent ; 
and  Charles  carried  out  his  pledges  to  the  papacy  by  tak- 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  221 

ing  the  field  in  the  spring  of  1546  to  break  up  the  League 
of  Schmalkald.  But  the  army  gathered  under  the  Elector 
of  Saxony  and  the  Landgrave  of  Hesse  so  far  outnumbered 
the  Imperial  forces  that  the  Emperor  could  not  venture  on 
a  battle.  Henry  watched  the  course  of  Charles  with  a 
growing  anxiety.  The  hopes  of  a  purified  and  united 
Christendom  which  has  drawn  him  a  few  years  back  to 
the  Emperor's  side  faded  before  the  stern  realities  of  th* 
Council.  The  highest  pretensions  of  the  Papacy  had  been 
sanctioned  by  the  bishops  gathered  at  Trent ;  and  to  the 
pretensions  of  the  Papacy  Henry  was  resolved  not  to  bow. 
He  was  driven,  whether  he  would  or  no,  on  the  policy  of 
Cromwell ;  and  in  the  last  months  of  his  life  he  offered  aid 
to  the  League  of  Schmalkald.  His  offers  were  rejected ; 
for  the  Lutheran  princes  had  no  faith  in  his  sincerity,  and 
believed  themselves  strong  enough  to  deal  with  the  Em- 
peror without  foreign  help. 

But  his  attitude  without  told  on  his  policy  at  home.  To 
the  hotter  Catholics  as  to  the  hotter  Protestants  the  years 
since  Cromwell's  fall  had  seemed  years  of  a  gradual  return 
to  Catholicism.  There  had  been  a  slight  sharpening  of 
persecution  for  the  Protestants,  and  restrictions  had  been 
put  on  the  reading  of  the  English  Bible.  The  alliance 
with  Charles  and  the  hope  of  reconciling  England  anew 
with  a  pacified  Christendom  gave  fresh  cause  for  suppress- 
ing heresy.  Neither  Norfolk  nor  his  master  indeed  de- 
sired any  rigorous  measure  of  reaction,  for  Henry  re- 
mained proud  of  the  work  he  had  done.  His  bitterness 
against  the  Papacy  only  grew  as  the  years  went  by ;  and 
at  the  very  moment  that  heretics  were  suffering  for  a  de- 
nial of  the  mass,  others  were  suffering  by  their  side  for  a 
denial  of  the  supremacy.  But  strange  and  anomalous  as 
its  system  seemed,  the  drift  of  Henry's  religious  govern- 
ment had  as  yet  been  in  one  direction,  that  of  a  return  to 
and  reconciliation  with  the  body  of  the  Catholic  Church. 
With  the  decision  of  the  Council  and  the  new  attitude  of 
the  Emperor  this  drift  was  suddenly  arrested.  It  was  not 


222  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

that  Henry  realized  the  revolution  that  was  opening  before 
him  or  the  vast  importance  of  the  steps  which  his  policy 
now  led  him  to  take.  His  tendency,  like  that  of  his  peo- 
ple, was  religious  rather  than  theological,  practical  rather 
than  speculative.  Of  the  immense  problems  which  were 
opening  in  the  world  neither  he  nor  England  saw  any- 
thing. The  religious  strife  which  was  to  break  Europe 
asunder  was  to  the  King  as  to  the  bulk  of  Englishmen  a 
quarrel  of  words  and  hot  temper ;  the  truth  which  Chris- 
tendom was  to  rend  itself  to  pieces  in  striving  to  discover 
was  a  thing  that  could  easily  be  found  with  the  aid  of 
God.  There  is  something  humorous  as  there  is  something 
pathetic  in  the  warnings  which  Henry  addressed  to  the 
Parliament  at  the  close  of  1545.  The  shadow  of  death  as 
it  fell  over  him  gave  the  King's  words  a  new  gentleness 
and  tenderness.  "  The  special  foundation  of  our  religion 
being  charity  between  man  and  man,  it  is  so  refrigerate 
as  there  never  was  more  dissension  and  lack  of  love  be- 
tween man  and  man,  the  occasions  whereof  are  opinions 
only  and  names  devised  for  the  continuance  of  the  same. 
Some  are  called  Papists,  some  Lutherans,  and  some  Ana- 
baptists; names  devised  of  the  devil,  and  yet  not  fully 
without  ground,  for  the  severing  of  one  man's  heart  by 
conceit  of  opinion  from  the  other."  But  the  remedy  was 
a  simple  one.  Every  man  was  "to  travail  first  for  his 
own  amendment."  Then  the  bishops  and  clergy  were  to 
agree  in  their  teaching,  "  which,  seeing  there  is  but  one 
truth  and  verity,  they  may  easily  do,  calling  therein  for 
the  grace  of  God."  Then  the  nobles  and  laity  were  to  be 
pious  and  humble,  to  read  their  new  Bibles  "reverently 
and  humbly  .  .  .  and  in  any  doubt  to  resort  to  the  learned 
or  at  best  the  higher  powers."  "  I  am  very  sorry  to  know 
and  hear  how  unreverendly  that  precious  jewel,  the  Word 
of  God,  is  disputed,  rhymed,  sung,  and  jangled  in  every 
alehouse  and  tavern.  This  kind  of  man  is  depraved  and 
that  kind  of  man,  this  ceremony  and  that  ceremony."  All 
this  controversy  might  be  done  away  by  simple  charity. 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  223 

"  Therefore  be  in  charity  one  with  another  like  brother  and 
brother.  Have  respect  to  the  pleasing  of  God ;  and  then 
I  doubt  not  that  love  I  spoke  of  shall  never  be  dissolved 
between  us." 

There  is  something  wonderful  in  the  English  coolness 
and  narrowness,  in  the  speculative  blindness  and  practical 
good  sense  which  could  look  out  over  such  a  world  at  such 
a  moment,  and  could  see  nothing  in  it  save  a  quarrel  of 
"opinions,  and  of  names  devised  for  the  continuance  of 
the  same."  But  Henry  only  expressed  the  general  feeling 
of  his  people.  England  indeed  was  being  slowly  leavened 
with  a  new  spirit.  The  humiliation  of  the  clergy,  the 
Lutheran  tendencies  of  half  the  bishops,  the  crash  of  the 
abbeys,  the  destruction  of  chantries  and  mass-chapels,  a 
measure  which  told  closely  on  the  actual  worship  of  the 
day,  the  new  articles  of  faith,  the  diffusion  of  bibles,  the 
"jangling"  and  discussion  which  followed  on  every  step 
in  the  King's  course,  were  all  telling  on  the  thoughts  of 
men.  But  the  temper  of  the  nation  as  a  whole  remained 
religiously  conservative.  It  drifted  rather  to  the  moderate 
reforms  of  the  New  Learning  than  to  any  radical  recon- 
struction of  the  Church.  There  was  a  general  disinclina- 
tion indeed  to  push  matters  to  either  extreme,  a  general 
shrinking  from  the  persecution  which  the  Catholic  called 
for  as  from  the  destruction  which  the  Protestant  was  de- 
siring. It  was  significant  that  a  new  heresy  bill  which 
passed  through  the  Lords  in  1545  quietly  disappeared  when 
it  reached  the  Commons.  But  this  shrinking  rested  rather 
on  national  than  on  theological  grounds,  on  a  craving  for 
national  union  which  Henry  expressed  in  his  cry  for 
"brotherly  love,"  and  on  an  imperfect  appreciation  of  the 
real  nature  or  consequence  of  the  points  at  issue  which 
made  men  shrink  from  burning  their  neighbors  for  "  opin- 
ions and  names  devised  for  the  continuance  of  the  same." 
What  Henry  and  what  the  bulk  of  Englishmen  wanted 
was,  not  indeed  wholly  to  rest  in  what  had  been  done,  but 
to  do  little  more  save  the  remedying  of  obvious  abuses  or 


224  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

the  carrying  on  of  obvious  improvements.  One  such  im- 
provement was  the  supplying  men  with  the  means  of  pri- 
vate devotion  in  their  own  tongue,  a  measure  from  which 
none  but  the  fanatics  of  either  side  dissented.  This  pro- 
cess went  slowly  on  in  the  issuing  of  two  primers  in  1535 
and  1539,  the  rendering  into  English  of  the  Creed,  the 
Lord's  Prayer,  and  the  Ten  Commandments,  the  publica- 
tion of  an  English  Litany  for  outdoor  processions  in  1544, 
and  the  adding  to  this  of  a  collection  of  English  prayers 
in  1545. 

But  the  very  tone  of  Henry  shows  his  consciousness 
that  this  religious  truce  rested  on  his  will  alone.  Around 
him  as  he  lay  dying  stood  men  who  were  girding  them- 
selves to  a  fierce  struggle  for  power,  a  struggle  that  could 
not  fail  to  wake  the  elements  of  religious  discord  which  he 
had  striven  to  lull  asleep.  Adherents  of  the  Papacy,  ad- 
vocates of  a  new  submission  to  a  foreign  spiritual  juris- 
diction there  were  few  or  none ;  for  the  most  conservative 
of  English  Churchmen  or  nobles  had  as  yet  no  wish  to  re- 
store the  older  Roman  supremacy.  But  Norfolk  and  Gar- 
diner were  content  with  this  assertion  of  national  and 
ecclesiastical  independence;  in  all  matters  of  faith  they 
were  earnest  to  conserve,  to  keep  things  as  they  were,  and 
in  front  of  them  stood  a  group  of  nobles  who  were  bent  on 
radical  change.  The  marriages,  the  reforms,  the  profu- 
sion of  Henry  had  aided  him  in  his  policy  of  weakening 
the  nobles  by  building  up  a  new  nobility  which  sprang 
from  the  Court  and  was  wholly  dependent  on  the  Crown. 
Such  were  the  Russells,  the  Cavendishes,  the  Wriothesieys, 
the  Fitzwilliams.  Such  was  John  Dudley,  a  son  of  the 
Dudley  who  had  been  put  to  death  for  his  financial  oppres- 
sion in  Henry  the  Seventh's  days,  but  who  had  been  re- 
stored in  blood,  attached  to  the  court,  raised  to  the  peerage 
as  Lord  Lisle,  and  who,  whether  as  adviser  or  general, 
had  been  actively  employed  in  high  stations  at  the  close 
of  this  reign.  Such  above  all  were  the  two  brothers  of 
Jane  Seymour.  The  elder  of  the  two,  Edward  Seymour, 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  225 

had  been  raised  to  the  earldom  of  Hertford,  and  entrusted 
with  the  command  of  the  English  army  in  its  operations 
against  Scotland.  As  uncle  of  Henry's  boy  Edward,  he 
could  not  fail  to  play  a  leading  part  in  the  coming  reign ; 
and  the  nobles  of  the  "new  blood,"  as  their  opponents 
called  them  in  disdain,  drew  round  him  as  their  head. 
Without  any  historical  hold  on  the  country,  raised  by  the 
royal  caprice,  and  enriched  by  the  spoil  of  the  monasteries, 
tbese  nobles  were  pledged  to  the  changes  from  which  they 
had  sprung  and  to  the  party  of  change.  Over  the  mass  of 
the  nation  their  influence  was  small ;  and  in  the  strife  for 
power  with  the  older  nobles  which  they  were  anticipating 
they  were  forced  to  look  to  the  small  but  resolute  body  of 
men  who,  whether  from  religious  enthusiasm  or  from  greed 
of  wealth  or  power,  were  bent  on  bringing  the  English 
Church  nearer  to  conformity  with  the  reformed  Churches 
of  the  Continent.  As  Henry  drew  to  his  grave  the  two 
factions  faced  each  other  with  gathering  dread  and  gather- 
ing hate.  Hot  words  betrayed  their  hopes.  "If  God 
should  call  the  King  to  his  mercy,"  said  Norfolk's  son, 
Lord  Surrey,  "  who  were  so  meet  to  govern  the  Prince  as 
my  lord  my  father?"  "Rather  than  it  should  come  to 
pass,"  retorted  a  partisan  of  Hertford's,  "that  the  Prince 
should  be  under  the  governance  of  your  father  or  you,  I 
would  abide  the  adventure  to  thrust  a  dagger  in  you !" 

In  the  history  of  English  poetry  the  name  of  Lord 
Surrey  takes  an  illustrious  place.  An  Elizabethan  writer 
tells  us  how  at  this  time  "  sprang  up  a  new  company  of 
courtly  makers,  of  whom  Sir  Thomas  Wyatt  the  elder  and 
Henry,  Earl  of  Surrey,  were  the  two  chieftains;  who 
having  travelled  to  Italy,  and  there  tasted  the  sweet  and 
stately  measures  and  style  of  the  Italian  poesy,  as  novices 
newly  crept  out  of  the  schools  of  Dante,  Ariosto,  and  Pe- 
trarch, they  greatly  polished  our  rude  and  homely  manner 
of  vulgar  poesy  from  what  it  had  been  before,  and  for  that 
cause  may  justly  be  said  to  be  the  first  reformers  of  our 
English  metre  and  style."  The  dull  moralizings  of  the 


226  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

rhymers  who  followed  Chaucer,  the  rough  but  vivacious 
doggerel  of  Skelton,  made  way  in  the  hands  of  Wyatt  and 
Surrey  for  delicate  imitations  of  the  songs,  sonnets,  and 
rondels  of  Italy  and  France.  With  the  Italian  conceits 
came  an  Italian  refinement  whether  of  words  or  of  thought ; 
and  the  force  and  versatility  of  Surrey's  youth  showed  it- 
self in  whimsical  satires,  in  classical  translations,  in  love- 
sonnets,  and  in  paraphrases  of  the  Psalms.  In  his  version 
of  two  books  of  the  Mneid  he  was  the  first  to  introduce  into 
England  the  Italian  blank  verse  which  was  to  play  so 
great  a  part  in  our  literature.  But  with  the  poetic  taste 
of  the  Renascence  Surrey  inherited  its  wild  and  reckless 
energy.  Once  he  was  sent  to  the  Fleet  for  challenging  a 
gentleman  to  fight.  Release  enabled  him  to  join  his  father 
in  an  expedition  against  Scotland,  but  he  was  no  sooner 
back  than  the  Londoners  complained  how  at  Candlemas 
the  young  lord  and  his  comrades  "  went  out  with  stone 
bows  at  midnight,"  and  how  next  day  "there  was  great 
clamor  of  the  breaking  of  many  glass  windows  both  of 
houses  and  churches,  and  shooting  at  men  that  might  be 
in  the  streets."  In  spite  of  his  humorous  excuse  that  the 
jest  only  purposed  to  bring  home  to  men  that  "  from  jus- 
tice's rod  no  fault  is  free,  but  that  all  such  as  work  unright 
in  most  quiet  are  next  unrest,"  Surrey  paid  for  this  out- 
break with  a  fresh  arrest  which  drove  him  to  find  solace 
in  paraphrases  of  Ecclesiastes  and  the  Psalms.  Soon  he 
was  over  sea  with  the  English  troops  in  Flanders,  and  in 
1544  serving  as  marshal  of  the  camp  to  conduct  the  retreat 
after  the  siege  of  Montreuil.  Sent  to  relieve  Boulogne, 
he  remained  in  charge  of  the  town  till  the  spring  of  1546, 
when  he  returned  to  England  to  rhyme  sonnets  to  a  fair 
Geraldine,  the  daughter  of  the  Earl  of  Kildare,  and  to 
plunge  into  the  strife  of  factions  around  the  dying  King. 

All  moral  bounds  had  been  loosened  by  the  spirit  of  the 
Renascence,  and,  if  we  accept  the  charge  of  his  rivals, 
Surrey  now  aimed  at  gaining  a  hold  on  Henry  by  offering 
him  his  sister  as  a  mistress.  It  is  as  possible  that  the 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  227 

young  Earl  was  aiming  simply  at  the  displacement  of 
Catharine  Parr,  and  at  the  renewal  by  his  sister's  eleva- 
tion to  the  throne  of  that  matrimonial  hold  upon  Henry 
which  the  Howards  had  already  succeeded  in  gaining 
through  the  unions  with  Anne  Boleyn  and  Catharine 
Howard.  But  a  temper  such  as  Surrey's  was  ill-matched 
against  the  subtle  and  unscrupulous  schemers  who  saw 
their  enemy  in  a  pride  that  scorned  the  "  new  men"  about 
him  and  vowed  that  when  once  the  King  was  dead  "  they 
should  smart  for  it."  The  turn  of  foreign  affairs  gave  a 
fresh  strength  to  the  party  which  sympathized  with  the 
Protestants  and  denounced  that  alliance  with  the  Emperor 
which  had  been  throughout  the  policy  of  the  Howards. 
Henry's  offer  of  aid  to  the  Lutheran  princes  marked  the 
triumph  of  this  party  in  the  royal  councils ;  and  the  new 
steps  which  Cranmer  was  suffered  to  make  toward  an 
English  Liturgy  showed  that  the  religious  truce  of  Henry's 
later  years  was  at  last  abandoned.  Hertford,  the  head  of 
the  "new  men,"  came  more  to  the  front  as  the  waning 
health  of  the  King  brought  Jane  Seymour's  boy,  Edward, 
nearer  to  the  throne.  In  the  new  reign  Hertford,  as  the 
boy's  uncle,  was  sure  to  play  a  great  part;  and  he  used  his 
new  influence  to  remove  the  only  effective  obstacle  to  his 
future  greatness.  Surrey's  talk  of  his  royal  blood,  the 
Duke's  quartering  of  the  royal  arms  to  mark  his  Planta- 
genet  descent,  and  some  secret  interviews  with  the  French 
ambassador  were  adroitly  used  to  wake  Henry's  jealousy 
of  the  dangers  which  might  beset  the  throne  of  his  child. 
Norfolk  and  his  son  were  alike  committed  to  the  Tower 
at  the  close  of  1546.  A  month  later  Surrey  was  condemned 
and  sent  to  the  block,  and  his  father  was  only  saved  by 
the  sudden  death  of  Henry  the  Eighth  in  January,  1547. 

By  an  Act  passed  in  the  Parliament  of  1544  it  had  been 
provided  that  the  crown  should  pass  to  Henry's  son  Ed- 
ward, and  on  Edward's  death  without  issue  to  his  sister 
Mary.  Should  Mary  prove  childless  it  was  to  go  to  Eliza- 
beth, the  child  of  Anne  Boleyn.  Beyond  this  point  the 


228  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

Houses  would  make  no  provision,  but  power  was  given  to 
the  King  to  make  further  dispositions  by  will.  At  his 
death  it  was  found  that  Henry  had  passed  over  the  line  of 
his  sister  Margaret  of  Scotland,  and  named  as  next  in  the 
succession  to  Elizabeth  the  daughters  of  his  younger  sis- 
ter Mary  by  her  marriage  with  Charles  Brandon,  Duke  of 
Suffolk.  As  Edward  was  but  nine  years  old  Henry  had 
appointed  a  carefully  balanced  Council  of  Regency ;  but 
the  will  fell  into  Hertford's  keeping,  and  when  the  list  of 
regents  was  at  last  disclosed  Gardiner,  who  had  till  now 
been  the  leading  minister,  was  declared  to  have  been  ex- 
cluded from  the  number  of  executors.  Whether  the  ex- 
clusion was  Henry's  act  or  the  act  of  the  men  who  used 
his  name,  the  absence  of  the  bishop  with  the  imprisonment 
of  Norfolk  threw  the  balance  of  power  on  the  side  of  the 
"  new  men"  who  were  represented  by  Hertford  and  Lisle. 
Their  chief  opponent,  the  Chancellor  Wriothesley,  strug- 
gled in  vain  against  their  next  step  toward  supremacy,  the 
modification  of  Henry's  will  by  the  nomination  of  Hert- 
ford as  Protector  of  the  realm  and  governor  of  Edward's 
person.  Alleged  directions  from  the  dying  King  served 
as  pretexts  for  the  elevation  of  the  whole  party  to  higher 
rank  in  the  state.  It  was  to  repair  "  the  decay  of  the  old 
English  nobility"  that  Hertford  raised  himself  to  the 
dukedom  of  Somerset  and  his  brother  to  the  barony  of 
Seymour,  the  queen's  brother  Lord  Parr  to  the  marquisate 
of  Northampton,  Lisle  to  the  earldom  of  Warwick,  Russell 
to  that  of  Bedford,  Wriothesley  to  that  of  Southampton. 
Ten  of  their  partisans  became  barons,  and  as  the  number 
of  peers  in  spite  of  recent  creations  still  stood  at  about 
fifty  such  a  group  constituted  a  power  in  the  Upper  House. 
Alleged  directions  of  the  King  were  conveniently  remem- 
bered to  endow  the  new  peers  with  public  money,  though 
the  treasury  was  beggared  and  the  debt  pressing.  The 
expulsion  of  Wriothesley  from  the  Chancellorship  and 
Council  soon  left  the  "new  men"  without  a  check;  but 
they  were  hardly  masters  of  the  royal  power  when  &  bold 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  229 

stroke  of  Somerset  laid  all  at  his  feet.  A  new  patent  of 
Protectorate,  drawn  out  in  the  boy-King's  name,  em- 
powered his  uncle  to  act  with  or  without  the  consent  of 
his  fellow  executors,  and  left  him  supreme  in  the  realm. 

Boldly  and  adroitly  as  the  whole  revolution  had  been 
managed,  it  was  none  the  less  a  revolution.  To  crush 
their  opponents  the  Council  had  first  used,  and  then  set 
aside,  Henry's  will.  Hertford  in  turn  by  the  use  of  his 
nephew's  name  set  aside  both  the  will  and  the  Council. 
A  country  gentleman,  who  had  risen  by  the  accident  of  his 
sister's  queenship  to  high  rank  at  the  Court,  had  thus  by 
sheer  intrigue  and  self-assertion  made  himself  ruler  of  the 
realm.  But  daring  and  self-confident  as  he  was,  Somerset 
was  forced  by  his  very  elevation  to  seek  support  for  the 
power  he  had  won  by  this  surprise  in  measures  which 
marked  the  retreat  of  the  Monarchy  from  that  position  of 
pure  absolutism  which  it  had  reached  at  the  close  of 
Henry's  reign.  The  Statute  that  had  given  to  royal  proc- 
lamations the  force  of  law  was  repealed,  and  several  of  the 
new  felonies  and  treasons  which  Cromwell  had  created 
and  used  with  so  terrible  an  effect  were  erased  from  the 
Statute  Book.  The  popularity  however  which  such  meas- 
ures won  was  too  vague  a  force  to  serve  in  the  strife  of  the 
moment.  Against  the  pressure  of  the  conservative  party 
who  had  so  suddenly  found  themselves  jockeyed  out  of 
power  Somerset  and  the  "  new  men"  could  look  for  no  help 
but  from  the  Protestants.  The  hope  of  their  support 
united  with  the  new  Protector's  personal  predilections  in 
his  patronage  of  the  innovations  against  which  Henry  had 
battled  to  the  last.  Cranmer  had  now  drifted  into  a  purely 
Protestant  position;  and  his  open  break  with  the  older 
system  followed  quickly  on  Seymour's  rise  to  power. 
"This  year,"  says  a  contemporary,  "the  Archbishop  of 
Canterbury  did  eat  meat  openly  in  Lent  in  the  Hall  of 
Lambeth,  the  like  of  which  was  never  seen  since  England 
was  a  Christian  country."  This  notable  act  was  followed 
by  a  rapid  succession  of  sweeping  changes.  The  legal 


230  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

prohibitions  of  Lollardry  were  rescinded ;  the  Six  Articles 
were  repealed ;  a  royal  injunction  removed  all  pictures  and 
images  from  the  churches.  A  formal  Statute  gave  priests 
the  right  to  many.  A  resolution  of  convocation  which 
was  confirmed  by  Parliament  brought  about  the  significant 
change  which  first  definitely  marked  the  severance  of  the 
English  Church  in  doctrine  from  the  Roman,  by  ordering 
that  the  sacrament  of  the  altar  should  be  administered  in 
both  kinds. 

A  yet  more  significant  change  followed.  The  old  tongue 
of  the  Church  was  not  to  be  disused  in  public  worship. 
The  universal  use  of  Latin  had  marked  the  Catholic  and 
European  character  of  the  older  religion ;  the  use  of  Eng- 
lish marked  the  strictly  national  and  local  character  of  the 
new  system.  In  the  spring  of  1548  a  new  Communion 
Service  in  English  took  the  place  of  the  Mass ;  an  English 
book  of  Common  Prayer,  the  Liturgy  which  with  slight 
alterations  is  still  used  in  the  Church  of  England,  soon  re- 
placed the  Missal  and  Breviary  from  which  its  contents 
are  mainly  drawn.  The  name  "Common  Prayer,"  which 
was  given  to  the  new  Liturgy,  marked  its  real  import. 
The  theory  of  worship  which  prevailed  through  Medieval 
Christendom,  the  belief  that  the  worshipper  assisted  only 
at  rites  wrought  for  him  by  priestly  hands,  at  a  sacrifice 
wrought  through  priestly  intervention,  at  the  offering  of 
prayer  and  praise  by  priestly  lips,  was  now  set  at  naught. 
"  The  laity,"  it  has  been  picturesquely  said,  "  were  called  up 
into  the  Chancel. "  The  act  of  devotion  became  a  "  common 
prayer"  of  the  whole  body  of  worshippers.  The  Mass  be- 
came a  "  communion"  of  the  whole  Christian  fellowship. 
The  priest  was  no  longer  the  offerer  of  a  mysterious  sacri- 
fice, the  mediator  between  God  and  the  worshipper;  he 
was  set  on  a  level  with  the  rest  of  the  Church,  and  brought 
down  to  be  the  simple  mouthpiece  of  the  congregation. 

What  gave  a  wider  importance  to  these  measures  was 
their  bearing  on  the  general  politics  of  Christendom.  The 
adhesion  of  England  to  the  Protestant  cause  came  at  a 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  231 

moment  when  Protestantism  seemed  on  the  verge  of  ruin. 
The  confidence  of  the  Lutheran  princes  in  their  ability  to 
resist  the  Emperor  had  been  seen  in  their  refusal  of  succor 
from  Henry  the  Eighth.  But  in  the  winter  of  Henry's 
death  the  secession  of  Duke  Maurice  of  Saxony  with  many 
of  his  colleagues  from  the  League  of  Schmalkald  so  weak- 
ened the  Protestant  body  that  Charles  was  able  to  put  its 
leaders  to  the  ban  of  the  Empire.  Hertford  was  hardly 
Protector  when  the  German  princes  called  loudly  for  aid ; 
but  the  fifty  thousand  crowns  which  were  secretly  sent  by 
the  English  Council  could  scarcely  have  reached  them 
when  in  April,  1547,  Charles  surprised  their  camp  at  Muhl- 
berg  and  routed  their  whole  army.  The  Elector  of  Saxony 
was  taken  prisoner;  the  Landgrave  of  Hesse  surrendered 
in  despair.  His  victory  left  Charles  master  of  the  Empire. 
The  jealousy  of  the  Pope  indeed  at  once  revived  with  the 
Emperor's  success,  and  his  recall  of  the  bishops  from  Trent 
forced  Charles  to  defer  his  wider  plans  for  enforcing  relig- 
ious unity ;  while  in  Germany  itself  he  was  forced  to  reckon 
with  Duke  Maurice  and  the  Protestant  princes  who  had 
deserted  the  League  of  Schmalkald,  but  whose  one  object 
in  joining  the  Emperor  had  been  to  provide  a  check  on  his 
after  movements.  For  the  moment  therefore  he  was  driven 
to  prolong  the  religious  truce  by  an  arrangement  called  the 
"Interim."  But  the  Emperor's  purpose  was  now  clear. 
Wherever  his  power  was  actually  felt  the  religious  reaction 
began;  and  the  Imperial  towns  which  held  firmly  to  the 
Lutheran  creed  were  reduced  by  force  of  arms.  It  was  of 
the  highest  moment  that  in  this  hour  of  despair  the  Prot- 
estants saw  their  rule  suddenly  established  in  a  new  quarter, 
and  the  Lutheranism  which  was  being  trampled  under  foot 
in  its  own  home  triumphant  in  England.  England  became 
the  common  refuge  of  the  panic-struck  Protestants.  Bucer 
and  Fagius  were  sent  to  lecture  at  Cambridge,  Peter 
Martyr  advocated  the  anti-sacrarnentarian  views  of  Cal- 
vin at  Oxford.  Cranmer  welcomed  refugees  from  every 
country,  Germans,  Italians,  French,  Poles,  and  Swiss,  to 


232  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

his  palace  at  Lambeth.  When  persecution  broke  out  in 
the  Low  Countries  the  fugitive  Walloons  were  received  at 
London  and  Canterbury,  and  allowed  to  set  up  in  both 
places  their  own  churches. 

But  Somerset  dreamed  of  a  wider  triumph  for  "  the  re- 
ligion." On  his  death-bed  Henry  was  said  to  have  en- 
forced on  the  Council  the  need  of  carrying  out  his  policy 
of  a  union  of  Scotland  with  England  through  the  marriage 
of  its  Queen  with  his  boy.  A  wise  statesmanship  would 
have  suffered  the  Protestant  movement  which  had  been 
growing  stronger  in  the  northern  kingdom  since  Beaton's 
death  to  run  quietly  its  course ;  and  his  colleagues  warned 
Somerset  to  leave  Scotch  affairs  untouched  till  Edward  was 
old  enough  to  undertake  them  in  person.  But  these  coun- 
sels were  set  aside ;  and  a  renewal  of  the  border  warfare 
enforced  the  Protector's  demands  for  a  closer  union  of  the 
kingdoms.  The  jealousy  of  France  was  roused  at  once, 
and  a  French  fleet  appeared  off  the  Scottish  coast  to  reduce 
the  castle  of  St.  Andrews,  which  had  been  held  since 
Beaton's  death  by  the  English  partisans  who  murdered 
him.  The  challenge  called  Somerset  himself  to  the  field ; 
and  crossing  the  Tweed  with  a  fine  army  of  eighteen 
thousand  men  in  the  summer  of  1547  the  Protector  pushed 
along  the  coast  till  he  found  the  Scots  encamped  behind 
the  Esk  on  the  slopes  of  Musselburgh,  six  miles  eastward 
of  Edinburgh.  The  English  invasion  had  drawn  all  the 
factions  of  the  kingdom  together  against  the  stranger,  and 
a  body  of  "  Gospellers"  under  Lord  Angus  formed  the  ad- 
vance-guard of  the  Scotch  army  as  it  moved  by  its  right 
on  the  tenth  of  September  to  turn  the  English  position  and 
drive  Somerset  into  the  sea.  The  English  horse  charged 
the  Scottish  front,  only  to  be  flung  off  by  it  spikemen ;  but 
their  triumph  threw  the  Lowlanders  into  disorder,  and  as 
they  pushed  forward  in  pursuit  their  advance  was  roughly 
checked  by  the  fire  of  a  body  of  Italian  musketeers  whom 
Somerset  had  brought  with  him.  The  check  was  turned 
into  a  defeat  by  a  general  charge  of  the  English  line,  a 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  233 

fatal  panic  broke  the  Scottish  host,  and  ten  thousand  men 
fell  in  its  headlong  flight  beneath  the  English  lances. 

Victor  as  he  was  at  Pinkie  Cleugh,  Somerset  was  soon 
forced  by  famine  to  fall  back  from  the  wasted  country. 
His  victory  had  been  more  fatal  to  the  interests  of  England 
than  a  defeat.  The  Scots  in  despair  turned  as  of  old  to 
France,  and  bought  its  protection  by  consenting  to  the 
child-queen's  marriage  with  the  son  of  Henry  the  Second, 
who  had  followed  Francis  on  the  throne.  In  the  summer 
of  1548  Mary  Stuart  sailed  under  the  escort  of  a  French 
fleet  and  landed  safely  at  Brest.  Not  only  was  the  Tudor 
policy  of  union  foiled,  as  it  seemed,  forever,  but  Scotland 
was  henceforth  to  be  a  part  of  the  French  realm.  To  north 
as  to  south  England  would  feel  the  pressure  of  the  French 
King.  Nor  was  Somerset's  policy  more  successful  at  home. 
The  religious  changes  he  was  forcing  on  the  land  were  car- 
ried through  with  the  despotism,  if  not  with  the  vigor,  of 
Cromwell.  In  his  acceptance  of  the  personal  supremacy 
of  the  sovereign,  Gardiner  was  ready  to  bow  to  every 
change  which  Henry  had  ordered,  or  which  his  son,  when 
of  age  to  be  fully  King,  might  order  in  the  days  to  come. 
But  he  denounced  all  ecclesiastical  changes  made  during 
the  King's  minority  as  illegal  and  invalid.  Untenable  as 
it  was,  this  protest  probably  represented  the  general  mind 
of  Englishmen ;  but  the  bishop  was  committed  by  Council 
to  prison  in  the  Fleet,  and  though  soon  released  was  sent 
by  the  Protector  to  the  Tower.  The  power  of  preaching 
was  restricted  by  the  issue  of  licenses  only  to  the  friends  of 
the  Primate.  While  all  counter  arguments  were  rigidly 
suppressed,  a  crowd  of  Protestant  pamphleteers  flooded  the 
country  with  vehement  invectives  against  the  Mass  and  its 
superstitious  accompaniments.  The  suppression  of  chan- 
tries and  religious  guilds  which  was  now  being  carried  out 
enabled  Somerset  to  buy  the  assent  of  noble  and  landowner 
to  his  measures  by  glutting  their  greed  with  the  last  spoils 
of  the  Church. 

But  it  was  impossible  to  buy  off  the  general  aversion  of 


234  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

the  people  to  the  Protector's  measures ;  and  German  and 
Italian  mercenaries  had  to  be  introduced  to  stamp  out  the 
popular  discontent  which  broke  out  in  the  east,  in  the  west, 
and  in  the  midland  counties.  Everywhere  men  protested 
against  the  new  changes  and  called  for  the  maintenance  of 
the  system  of  Henry  the  Eighth.  The  Cornishmen  refused 
to  receive  the  new  service  "  because  it  is  like  a  Christmas 
game."  In  1549  Devonshire  demanded  by  open  revolt  the 
restoration  of  the  Mass  and  the  Six  Articles  as  well  as  a 
partial  re-establishment  of  the  suppressed  abbeys.  The 
agrarian  discontent  woke  again  in  the  general  disorder. 
Enclosures  and  evictions  were  going  steadily  on,  and  the 
bitterness  of  the  change  was  being  heightened  by  the  re- 
sults of  the  dissolution  of  the  abbeys.  Church  lands  had 
always  been  underlet,  the  monks  were  easy  landlords,  and 
on  no  estates  had  the  peasantry  been  as  yet  so  much  ex- 
empt from  the  general  revolution  in  culture.  But  the  new 
lay  masters  to  whom  the  abbey  lands  fell  were  quick  to 
reap  their  full  value  by  a  rise  of  rents  and  by  the  same 
processes  of  eviction  and  enclosure  as  went  on  elsewhere. 
The  distress  was  deepened  by  the  change  in  the  value  of 
money  which  was  now  beginning  to  be  felt  from  the  mass 
of  gold  and  silver  which  the  New  World  was  yielding  to 
the  Old,  and  still  more  by  a  general  rise  of  prices  that  fol- 
lowed on  the  debasement  of  the  coinage  which  had  begun 
with  Henry  and  went  on  yet  more  unscrupulously  under 
Somerset.  The  trouble  came  at  last  to  a  head  in  the  man- 
ufacturing districts  of  the  eastern  counties.  Twenty  thou- 
sand men  gathered  round  an  "  oak  of  Reformation"  near 
Norwich,  and  repulsing  the  royal  troops  in  a  desperate 
engagement  renewed  the  old  cries  for  a  removal  of  evil 
counsellors,  a  prohibition  of  enclosures,  and  redress  for  the 
grievances  of  the  poor. 

The  revolt  of  the  Norfolk  men  was  stamped  out  in  blood 
by  the  energy  of  Lord  Warwick,  as  the  revolt  in  the  west 
had  been  put  down  by  Lord  Russell,  but  the  risings  had 
given  a  fatal  blow  to  Somerset's  power.  It  had  already 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  235 

been  weakened  by  strife  within  his  own  family.  His 
brother  Thomas  had  been  created  Lord  Seymour  and  raised 
to  the  post  of  Lord  High  Admiral ;  but  glutted  as  he  was 
with  lands  and  honors,  his  envy  at  Somerset's  fortunes 
broke  out  in  a  secret  marriage  with  the  Queen-dowager, 
Catharine  Parr,  in  an  attempt  on  her  death  to  marry  Eliza- 
beth, and  in  intrigues  to  win  the  confidence  of  the  young 
King  and  detach  him  from  his  brother.  Seymour's  dis- 
content was  mounting  into  open  revolt  when  in  the  Janu- 
ary of  1549  he  was  arrested,  refused  a  trial,  attainted,  and 
sent  to  the  block.  The  stain  of  a  brother's  blood,  however 
justly  shed,  rested  from  that  hour  on  Somerset,  while  the 
nobles  were  estranged  from  him  by  his  resolve  to  enforce 
the  laws  against  enclosures  and  evictions,  as  well  as  by  the 
weakness  he  had  shown  in  the  presence  of  the  revolt. 
Able  indeed  as  Somerset  was,  his  temper  was  not  that  of  a 
ruler  of  men ;  and  his  miserable  administration  had  all  but 
brought  government  to  a  standstill.  While  he  was  dream- 
ing of  a  fresh  invasion  of  Scotland  the  treasury  was  empty, 
not  a  servant  of  the  state  was  paid,  and  the  soldiers  he  had 
engaged  on  the  Continent  refused  to  cross  the  Channel  in 
despair  of  receiving  their  hire.  It  was  only  by  loans  raised 
at  ruinous  interest  that  the  Protector  escaped  sheer  bank- 
ruptcy when  the  revolts  in  east  and  west  came  to  swell  the 
royal  expenses.  His  weakness  in  tampering  with  the 
popular  demands  completed  his  ruin.  The  nobles  dreaded 
a  communistic  outbreak  like  that  of  the  Suabian  peasantry, 
and  their  dread  was  justified  by  prophecies  that  monarchy 
and  nobility  were  alike  to  be  destroyed  and  a  new  rule  set 
up  under  governors  elected  by  the  people.  They  dreaded 
yet  more  the  being  forced  to  disgorge  their  spoil  to  appease 
the  discontent.  At  the  close  of  1549  therefore  the  Council 
withdrew  openly  from  Somerset,  and  forced  the  Protector 
to  resign. 

His  office  passed  to  the  Earl  of  Warwick,  to  whose  ruth- 
less severity  the  suppression  of  the  revolt  was  mainly  due. 
The  change  of  governors  however  brought  about  no  change 


236  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boos  VI. 

of  system.  Peace  indeed  was  won  from  France  by  the 
immediate  surrender  of  Boulogne ;  but  the  misgovernment 
remained  as  great  as  ever,  the  currency  was  yet  further 
debased,  and  a  wild  attempt  made  to  remedy  the  effects  of 
this  measure  by  a  royal  fixing  of  prices.  It  was  in  vain 
that  Latimer  denounced  the  prevailing  greed,  and  bade  the 
Protestant  lords  choose  "  either  restitution  or  else  damna- 
tion." Their  sole  aim  seemed  to  be  that  of  building  up 
their  own  fortunes  at  the  cost  of  the  state.  All  pretence 
of  winning  popular  sympathy  was  gone,  and  the  rule  of 
the  upstart  nobles  who  formed  the  Council  of  Regency  be- 
came simply  a  rule  of  terror.  "  The  grea  part  of  the  peo- 
ple," one  of  their  creatures,  Cecil,  avowed,  "is  not  in  favor 
of  defending  this  cause,  but  of  aiding  its  adversaries ;  on 
that  side  are  the  greater  part  of  the  nobles,  who  absent 
themselves  from  Court,  ah1  the  bishops  save  three  or  four, 
almost  all  the  judges  and  lawyers,  almost  all  the  justices 
of  the  peace,  the  priests  who  can  move  their  flocks  any 
way,  for  the  whole  of  the  commonalty  is  in  such  a  state  of 
irritation  that  it  will  easily  follow  any  stir  toward 
change."  But  united  as  it  was  in  its  opposition  the  na- 
tion was  helpless.  The  system  of  despotism  which  Crom- 
well built  up  had  been  seized  by  a  knot  of  adventurers,  and 
with  German  and  Italian  mercenaries  at  their  disposal 
they  rode  roughshod  over  the  land. 

At  such  a  moment  it  seemed  madness  to  provoke  foes 
abroad  as  well  as  at  home,  but  the  fanaticism  of  the  young 
King  was  resolved  to  force  on  his  sister  Mary  a  compliance 
with  the  new  changes,  and  her  resistance  was  soon  backed 
by  the  remonstrances  of  her  cousin,  the  Emperor.  Charles 
was  now  at  the  height  of  his  power,  master  of  Germany, 
preparing  to  make  the  Empire  hereditary  in  the  person  of 
his  son,  Philip,  and .  preluding  a  wider  effort  to  suppress 
heresy  throughout  the  world  by  the  establishment  of  the 
Inquisition  in  the  Netherlands  and  a  fiery  persecution 
which  drove  thousands  of  Walloon  heretics  to  find  a  refuge 
in  England.  But  heedless  of  dangers  from  without  or  of 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  237 

dangers  from  within  Cranmer  and  his  colleagues  advanced 
more  boldly  than  ever  in  the  career  of  innovation.  Four 
prelates  who  adhered  to  the  older  system  were  deprived  of 
their  sees  and  committed  on  frivolous  pretexts  to  the  Tower. 
A  new  Catechism  embodied  the  doctrines  of  the  reformers, 
and  a  book  of  Homilies  which  enforced  the  chief  Protes- 
tant tenets  was  ordered  to  be  read  in  Churches.  A 
crowning  defiance  was  given  to  the  doctrine  of  the  Mass 
by  an  order  to  demolish  the  stone  altars  and  replace  them 
by  wooden  tables,  which  were  stationed  for  the  most  part 
in  the  middle  of  the  church.  In  1 552  a  revised  Prayer-book 
was  issued,  and  every  change  made  in  it  leaned  directly 
toward  the  extreme  Protestantism  which  was  at  this  time 
finding  a  home  at  Geneva.  On  the  cardinal  point  of  dif- 
ference, the  question  of  the  sacrament,  the  new  formularies 
broke  away  not  only  from  the  doctrine  of  Rome  but  from 
that  of  Luther,  and  embodied  the  anti-sacramentarian 
tenets  of  Zuingli  and  Calvin.  Forty-two  Articles  of  Re- 
ligion were  introduced;  and  though  since  reduced  by 
omissions  to  thirty-nine  these  have  remained  to  this  day 
the  formal  standard  of  doctrine  in  the  English  Church. 
Like  the  Prayer-book,  they  were  mainly  the  work  of  Cran- 
mer ;  and  belonging  as  they  did  to  the  class  of  Confessions 
which  were  now  being  framed  in  Germany  to  be  presented 
to  the  Council  of  Christendom  which  Charles  was  still 
resolute  to  re-assemble,  they  marked  the  adhesion  of  Eng- 
land to  the  Protestant  movement  on  the  Continent.  Even 
the  episcopal  mode  of  government  which  still  connected  the 
English  Church  with  the  old  Catholic  Communion  was 
reduced  to  a  form ;  in  Cranmer's  mind  the  spiritual  powers 
of  the  bishops  were  drawn  simply  from  the  King's  com- 
mission as  their  temporal  jurisdiction  was  exercised  in  the 
King's  name.  They  were  reduced  therefore  to  the  position 
of  royal  officers,  and  called  to  hold  their  offices  simply  at  the 
royal  pleasure.  The  sufferings  of  the  Protestants  had  failed 
to  teach  them  the  worth  of  religious  liberty ;  and  a  new  code 
of  ecclesiastical  laws,  which  was  ordered  to  be  drawn  up 


238  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

by  a  body  of  Commissioners  as  a  substitute  for  the  Canon 
Law  of  the  Catholic  Church,  although  it  shrank  from  the 
penalty  of  death,  attached  that  of  perpetual  imprisonment 
or  exile  to  the  crimes  of  heresy,  blasphemy,  and  adultery, 
and  declared  excommunication  to  involve  a  severance  of 
the  offender  from  the  mercy  of  God  and  his  deliverance  into 
the  tyranny  of  the  devil.  Delays  in  the  completion  of  this 
Code  prevented  its  legal  establishment  during  Edward's 
reign ;  but  the  use  of  the  new  Liturgy  and  attendance  at 
the  new  service  was  enforced  by  imprisonment,  and  sub- 
scription to  the  Articles  of  Faith  was  demanded  by  royal 
authority  from  all  clergymen,  churchwardens,  and  school- 
masters. 

The  distaste  for  changes  so  hurried  and  so  rigorously 
enforced  was  increased  by  the  daring  speculations  of  the 
more  extreme  Protestants.  The  real  value  of  the  religious 
revolution  of  the  sixteenth  century  to  mankind  lay,  not  in 
its  substitution  of  one  creed  for  another,  but  in  the  new 
spirit  of  inquiry,  the  new  freedom  of  thought  and  of  dis- 
cussion, which  was  awakened  during  the  process  of  change. 
But  however  familiar  such  a  truth  may  be  to  us,  it  was 
absolutely  hidden  from  the  England  of  the  time.  Men 
heard  with  horror  that  the  foundations  of  faith  and  morality 
were  questioned,  polygamy  advocated,  oaths  denounced  as 
unlawful,  community  of  goods  raised  into  a  sacred  obliga- 
tion, the  very  Godhead  of  the  Founder  of  Christianity  de- 
nied. The  repeal  of  the  Statute  of  Heresy  left  indeed  the 
powers  of  the  Common  Law  intact,  and  Cranmer  availed 
himself  of  these  to  send  heretics  of  the  last  class  without 
mercy  to  the  stake.  But  within  the  Church  itself  the 
Primate's  desire  for  uniformity  was  roughly  resisted  by 
the  more  ardent  members  of  his  own  party.  Hooper,  who 
had  been  named  Bishop  of  Gloucester,  refused  to  wear  the 
episcopal  habits,  and  denounced  them  as  the  livery  of  the 
"harlot  of  Babylon,"  a  name  for  the  Papacy  which  was 
supposed  to  have  been  discovered  in  the  Apocalypse.  Ec- 
clesiastical order  came  almost  to  an  end.  Priests  flung 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  239 

aside  the  surplice  as  superstitious.  Patrons  of  livings  pre- 
sented their  huntsmen  or  gamekeepers  to  the  benefices  in 
their  gift,  and  kept  the  stipend.  All  teaching  of  divinity 
ceased  at  the  Universities :  the  students  indeed  had  fallen 
off  in  numbers,  the  libraries  were  in  part  scattered  or 
burned,  the  intellectual  impulse  of  the  New  Learning  died 
away.  One  noble  measure  indeed,  the  foundation  of 
eighteen  Grammar  Schools,  was  destined  to  throw  a  lustre 
over  the  name  of  Edward,  but  it  had  no  time  to  bear  fruit 
in  his  reign. 

While  the  reckless  energy  of  the  reformers  brought 
England  to  the  verge  of  chaos,  it  brought  Ireland  to  the 
brink  of  rebellion.  The  fall  of  Cromwell  had  been  followed 
by  a  long  respite  in  the  religious  changes  which  he  was 
forcing  on  the  conquered  dependency ;  but  with  the  acces- 
sion of  Edward  the  Sixth  the  system  of  change  was  re- 
newed with  all  the  energy  of  Protestant  zeal.  In  1551  the 
bishops  were  summoned  before  the  deputy,  Sir  Anthony 
St.  Leger,  to  receive  the  new  English  Liturgy  which, 
though  written  in  a  tongue  as  strange  to  the  native  Irish 
as  Latin  itself,  was  now  to  supersede  the  Latin  service- 
book  in  every  diocese.  The  order  was  the  signal  for  an 
open  strife.  "  Now  shall  every  illiterate  fellow  read  mass," 
burst  forth  Dowdall,  the  Archbishop  of  Armagh,  as  he 
flung  out  of  the  chamber  with  all  but  one  of  his  suffragans 
at  his  heels.  Archbishop  Browne  of  Dublin  on  the  other 
hand  was  followed  in  his  profession  of  obedience  by  the 
Bishops  of  Meath,  Limerick,  and  Kildare.  The  govern- 
ment however  was  far  from  quailing  before  the  division  of 
the  episcopate.  Dowdall  was  driven  from  the  country; 
and  the  vacant  sees  were  filled  with  Protestants,  like  Bale, 
of  the  most  advanced  type.  But  no  change  could  be 
wrought  by  measures  such  as  these  in  the  opinions  of  the 
people  themselves.  The  new  episcopal  reformers  spoke  no 
Irish,  and  of  their  English  sermons  not  a  word  was  un- 
derstood by  the  rude  kernes  around  the  pulpit.  The  native 
priests  remained  silent.  "  As  for  preaching  we  have  nona, " 

U  VOL.  2 


240  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

reports  a  zealous  Protestant,  "  without  which  the  ignorant 
can  have  no  knowledge. "  The  prelates  who  used  the  new 
Prayer-book  were  simply  regarded  as  heretics.  The  B  ishop 
of  Meath  was  assured  by  one  of  his  flock  that,  "if  the 
country  wist  how,  they  would  eat  you."  Protestantism 
had  failed  to  wrest  a  single  Irishman  from  his  older  con- 
victions, but  it  succeeded  in  uniting  all  Ireland  against 
the  Crown.  The  old  political  distinctions  which  had  been 
produced  by  the  conquest  of  Strongbow  faded  before  the 
new  struggle  for  a  common  faith.  The  population  within 
the  Pale  and  without  it  became  one,  "  not  as  the  Irish  na- 
tion," it  has  been  acutely  said,  "  but  as  Catholics."  A  new 
sense  of  national  identity  was  found  in  the  identity  of  re- 
ligion. "Both  English  and  Irish  begin  to  oppose  your 
Lordship's  orders,"  Browne  had  written  to  Cromwell  at 
the  very  outset  of  these  changes,  "  and  to  lay  aside  their 
national  old  quarrels." 

Oversea  indeed  the  perils  of  the  new  government  passed 
suddenly  away.  Charles  had  backed  Mary's  resistance 
with  threats,  and  as  he  moved  forward  to  that  mastery  of 
the  world  to  which  he  confidently  looked  his  threats  might 
any  day  become  serious  dangers.  But  the  peace  with 
England  had  set  the  French  government  free  to  act  in 
Germany,  and  it  found  allies  in  the  great  middle  party  of 
princes  whose  secession  from  the  League  of  Schmalkald 
had  seemed  to  bring  ruin  to  the  Protestant  cause.  The 
aim  of  Duke  Maurice  in  bringing  them  to  desert  the 
League  had  been  to  tie  the  Emperor's  hands  by  the  very 
fact  of  their  joining  him,  and  for  a  while  this  policy  had 
been  successful.  But  the  death  of  Paul  the  Third,  whose 
jealousy  had  till  now  foiled  the  Emperor's  plans,  and  the 
accession  of  an  Imperial  nominee  to  the  Papal  throne,  en- 
abled Charles  to  move  more  boldly  to  his  ends,  and  at  the 
close  of  1551  a  fresh  assembly  of  the  Council  at  Trent,  and 
an  Imperial  summons  of  the  Lutheran  powers  to  send  di- 
vines to  its  sessions  and  to  submit  to  its  decisions,  brought 
matters  to  an  issue.  Maurice  was  forced  to  accept  the  aid 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  241 

of  the  stranger  and  to  conclude  a  secret  treaty  with  France. 
He  was  engaged  as  a  general  of  Charles  in  the  siege  of  Mag- 
deburg; but  in  the  spring  of  1552  the  army  he  had  then  at 
command  was  suddenly  marched  to  the  south,  and  through 
the  passes  of  the  Tyrol  the  Duke  moved  straight  on  the 
Imperial  camp  at  Innspruck.  Charles  was  forced  to  flee 
for  very  life  while  the  Council  at  Trent  broke  hastily  up, 
and  in  a  few  months  the  whole  Imperial  design  was  in 
ruin.  Henry  the  Second  was  already  moving  on  the  Rhine ; 
to  meet  the  French  King  Charles  was  forced  to  come  to  terms 
with  the  Lutheran  princes ;  and  his  signature  in  the  sum- 
mer of  a  Treaty  at  Passau  secured  to  their  states  the  free 
exercise  of  the  reformed  religion  and  gave  the  Protestant 
princes  their  due  weight  in  the  tribunals  of  the  empire. 

The  humiliation  of  the  Emperor,  the  fierce  warfare 
which  now  engaged  both  his  forces  and  those  of  France, 
removed  from  England  the  danger  of  outer  interference. 
But  within  the  misrule  went  recklessly  on.  All  that  men 
saw  was  a  religious  and  political  chaos,  in  which  ecclesi- 
astical order  had  perished  and  in  which  politics  were  dy< 
ing  down  into  the  squabbles  of  a  knot  of  nobles  over  the 
spoils  of  the  Church  and  the  Crown.  Not  content  with 
Somerset's  degradation,  the  Council  charged  him  in  1551 
with  treason,  and  sent  him  to  the  block.  Honors  and 
lands  were  lavished  as  ever  on  themselves  and  their  ad- 
herents. Warwick  became  Duke  of  Northumberland, 
Lord  Dorset  was  made  Duke  of  Suffolk,  Paulet  rose  to  the 
Marquisate  of  Winchester,  Sir  William  Herbert  was 
created  Earl  of  Pembroke.  The  plunder  of  the  chantries 
and  the  gilds  failed  to  glut  the  appetite  of  this  crew  of 
spoilers.  Half  the  lands  of  every  see  were  flung  to  them 
in  vain;  an  attempt  was  made  to  satisfy  their  greed  by  a 
suppression  of  the  wealthy  see  of  Durham ;  and  the  whole 
endowments  of  the  Church  were  threatened  with  confisca- 
tion. But  while  the  courtiers  gorged  themselves  with 
manors,  the  Treasury  grew  poorer.  The  coinage  was 
again  debased.  Crown  lands  to  the  value  of  five  millions 


242  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

of  our  modern  money  had  been  granted  away  to  the  friends 
of  Somerset  and  Warwick.  The  royal  expenditure 
mounted  in  seventeen  years  to  more  than  four  times  its 
previous  total.  In  spite  of  the  brutality  and  bloodshed 
with  which  revolt  had  been  suppressed,  and  of  the  foreign 
soldiery  on  whom  the  Council  relied,  there  were  signs  of 
resistance  which  would  have  made  less  reckless  statesmen 
pause.  The  temper  of  the  Parliament  had  drifted  far  from 
the  slavish  subservience  which  it  showed  at  the  close  of 
Henry's  reign.  The  House  of  Commons  met  Northumber- 
land's project  for  the  pillage  of  the  bishopric  of  Durham 
with  opposition,  and  rejected  a  new  treason  bill.  In  1552 
the  Duke  was  compelled  to  force  nominees  of  his  own  on 
the  constituencies  by  writs  from  the  Council  before  he 
could  count  on  a  house  to  his  mind.  Such  writs  had  been 
often  issued  since  the  days  of  Henry  the  Seventh ;  but  the 
ministers  of  Edward  were  driven  to  an  expedient  which 
shows  how  rapidly  the  temper  of  independence  was  grow- 
ing. The  summons  of  new  members  from  places  hitherto 
unrepresented  was  among  the  prerogatives  of  the  Crown, 
and  the  Protectorate  used  this  power  to  issue  writs  to 
small  villages  in  the  west  which  could  be  trusted  to  retain 
members  to  its  mind. 

This  "  packing  of  Parliament"  was  to  be  largely  extended 
in  the  following  reigns;  but  it  passed  as  yet  with  little 
comment.  What  really  kept  England  quiet  was  a  trust 
that  the  young  King,  who  would  be  of  age  in  two  or  three 
years,  would  then  set  all  things  right  again.  "  When  he 
comes  of  age,"  said  a  Hampshire  squire,  "he  will  see  an- 
other rule,  and  hang  up  a  hundred  heretic  knaves."  Ed- 
ward's temper  was  as  lordly  as  that  of  his  father,  and  had 
he  once  really  reigned  he  would  probably  have  dealt  as 
roughly  with  the  plunderers  who  had  used  his  name  as 
England  hoped.  But  he  was  a  fanatical  Protestant,  and 
his  rule  would  almost  certainly  have  forced  on  a  religious 
strife  as  bitter  and  disastrous  as  the  strife  which  broke  the 
strength  of  Germany  and  France.  From  this  calamity 


CHAP.  1.)  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  243 

the  country  was  saved  by  his  waning  health.  Edward 
was  now  fifteen,  but  in  the  opening  of  1553  the  signs 
of  coming  death  became  too  clear  for  Northumberland 
and  his  fellows  to  mistake  them.  By  the  Statute  of 
the  Succession  the  death  of  the  young  King  would  bring 
Mary  to  the  throne ;  and  as  Mary  was  known  to  have  re- 
fused acceptance  of  all  changes  in  her  father's  system,  and 
was  looked  on  as  anxious  only  to  restore  it,  her  accession 
became  a  subject  of  national  hope.  But  to  Northumberland 
and  his  fellows  her  succession  was  fatal.  They  had  per- 
sonally outraged  Mary  by  their  attempts  to  force  her  into 
compliance  with  their  system.  Her  first  act  would  be  to 
free  Norfolk  and  the  bishops  whom  they  held  prisoners  in 
the  Tower,  and  to  set  these  bitter  enemies  in  power.  With 
ruin  before  them  the  Protestant  lords  were  ready  for  a  fresh 
revolution ;  and  the  bigotry  of  the  young  King  fell  in  with 
their  plans. 

In  his  zeal  for  "the  religion,"  and  in  his  absolute  faith 
in  his  royal  autocracy,  Edward  was  ready  to  override  will 
and  statute  and  to  set  Mary's  rights  aside.  In  such  a  case 
the  crown  fell  legally  to  Elizabeth,  the  daughter  of  Anne 
Boleyn,  who  had  been  placed  by  the  Act  next  in  succession 
to  Mary,  and  whose  training  under  Catharine  Parr  and  the 
Seymours  gave  good  hopes  of  her  Protestant  sympathies. 
The  cause  of  Elizabeth  would  have  united  the  whole  of  the 
11  new  men"  in  its  defence,  and  might  have  proved  a  for- 
midable difficulty  in  Mary's  way.  But  for  the  mainte- 
nance of  his  personal  power  Northumberland  could  as  little 
count  on  Elizabeth  as  on  Mary ;  and  in  Edward's  death 
the  Duke  saw  a  chance  of  raising,  if  not  himself,  at  any 
rate  his  own  blood  to  the  throne.  He  persuaded  the  young 
King  that  he  possessed  as  great  a  right  as  his  father  to 
settle  the  succession  of  the  Crown  by  will.  Henry  had 
passed  by  the  children  of  his  sister  Margaret  of  Scotland, 
and  had  placed  next  to  Elizabeth  in  the  succession  the  chil- 
dren of  his  younger  sister  Mary,  the  wife  of  Charles  Bran- 
don, the  Duke  of  Suffolk.  Frances,  Mary's  child  by  this 


244  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

marriage,  was  still  living,  the  mother  of  three  daughters 
by  her  marriage  with  Grey,  Lord  Dorset,  a  hot  partisan 
of  the  religious  changes,  who  had  been  raised  under  the 
Protectorate  to  the  Dukedom  of  Suffolk.  Frances  was  a 
woman  of  thirty-seven;  but  her  accession  to  the  Crown 
squared  as  little  with  Northumberland's  plans  as  that  of 
Mary  or  Elizabeth.  In  the  will  therefore  which  the  young 
King  drew  up  Edward  was  brought  to  pass  over  Frances, 
and  to  name  as  his  successor  her  eldest  daughter,  the  Lady 
Jane  Grey.  The  marriage  of  Jane  Grey  with  Guildford 
Dudley,  the  fourth  son  of  Northumberland,  was  all  that 
was  needed  to  complete  the  unscrupulous  plot.  It  was  the 
celebration  of  this  marriage  in  May  which  first  woke  a 
public  suspicion  of  the  existence  of  such  designs,  and  the 
general  murmur  which  followed  on  the  suspicion  might 
have  warned  the  Duke  of  his  danger.  But  the  secret  was 
closely  kept,  and  it  was  only  in  June  that  Edward's  "  plan" 
was  laid  in  the  same  strict  secrecy  before  Northumberland's 
colleagues.  A  project  which  raised  the  Duke  into  a  virtual 
sovereignty  over  the  realm  could  hardly  fail  to  stir  resist- 
ance in  the  Council.  The  King  however  was  resolute, 
and  his  will  was  used  to  set  aside  all  scruples.  The  judges 
who  represented  that  letters  patent  could  not  override  a 
positive  statute  were  forced  into  signing  their  assent  by 
Edward's  express  command.  To  their  signatures  were 
added  those  of  the  whole  Council  with  Cranmer  at  its 
head.  The  primate  indeed  remonstrated,  but  his  remon- 
strances proved  as  fruitless  as  those  of  his  fellow  councillors. 
The  deed  was  hardly  done  when  on  the  sixth  of  July 
the  young  King  passed  away.  Northumberland  felt  little 
anxiety  about  the  success  of  his  design.  He  had  won  over 
Lord  Hastings  to  his  support  by  giving  him  his  daughter 
in  marriage,  and  had  secured  the  help  of  Lord  Pembroke 
by  wedding  Jane's  sister,  Catharine,  to  his  son.  The 
army,  the  fortresses,  the  foreign  soldiers,  were  at  his  com- 
mand; the  hotter  Protestants  were  with  him;  France,  in 
dread  of  Mary's  kinship  with  the  Emperor,  offered  sup- 


CHAP.  1.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  245 

port  to  his  plans.  Jane  therefore  was  at  once  proclaimed 
Queen  on  Edward's  death,  and  accepted  as  their  sovereign 
by  the  Lords  of  the  Council.  But  the  temper  of  the  whole 
people  rebelled  against  so  lawless  a  usurpation.  The  eastern 
counties  rose  as  one  man  to  support  Mary;  and  when 
Northumberland  marched  from  London  with  ten  thousand 
at  his  back  to  crush  the  rising,  the  Londoners,  Protestant  as 
they  were,  showed  their  ill-will  by  a  stubborn  silence.  "  The 
people  crowd  to  look  upon  us,"  the  Duke  noted  gloomily, 
"  but  not  one  calls  'God  speed  ye. '  "  While  he  halted  for 
reinforcements  his  own  colleagues  struck  him  down. 
Eager  to  throw  from  their  necks  the  yoke  of  a  rival  who 
had  made  himself  a  master,  the  Council  no  sooner  saw 
the  popular  reaction  than  they  proclaimed  Mary  Queen ; 
and  this  step  was  at  once  followed  by  a  declaration  of  the 
fleet  in  her  favor,  and  by  the  announcement  of  the  levies 
in  every  shire  that  they  would  only  fight  in  her  cause.  As 
the  tidings  reached  him  the  Duke's  courage  suddenly  gave 
way.  His  retreat  to  Cambridge  was  the  signal  for  a  general 
defection.  Northumberland  himself  threw  his  cap  into 
the  air  and  shouted  with  his  men  for  Queen  Mary.  But 
his  submission  failed  to  avert  his  doom ;  and  the  death  of 
the  Duke  drew  with  it  the  imprisonment  in  the  Tower  of 
the  hapless  girl  whom  he  had  made  the  tool  of  his  ambi- 
tion 


CHAPTER  II. 

THE  CATHOLIC  REACTION. 
1553—1558. 

THE  triumph  of  Mary  was  a  fatal  blow  at  the  system  of 
despotism  which  Henry  the  Eighth  had  established.  It 
was  a  system  that  rested  not  so  much  on  the  actual  strength 
possessed  by  the  Crown  as  on  the  absence  of  any  effective 
forces  of  resistance.  At  Henry's  death  the  one  force  of 
opposition  which  had  developed  itself  was  that  of  the 
Protestants,  but  whether  in  numbers  or  political  weight 
the  Protestants  were  as  yet  of  small  consequence,  and  their 
resistance  did  little  to  break  the  general  drift  of  both  nation 
and  King.  For  great  as  were  the  changes  which  Henry 
had  wrought  in  the  severance  of  England  from  the  Papacy 
and  the  establishment  of  the  ecclesiastical  supremacy  of 
the  Crown,  they  were  wrought  with  fair  assent  from  the 
people  at  large ;  and  when  once  the  discontent  roused  by 
Cromwell's  violence  had  been  appeased  by  his  fall  England 
as  a  whole  acquiesced  in  the  conservative  system  of  the 
King.  This  national  union  however  was  broken  by  the 
Protectorate.  At  the  moment  when  it  had  reached  its 
height  the  royal  authority  was  seized  by  a  knot  of  nobles 
and  recklessly  used  to  further  the  revolutionary  projects  of 
a  small  minority  of  the  people.  From  the  hour  of  this 
revolution  a  new  impulse  was  given  to  resistance.  The 
older  nobility,  the  bulk  of  the  gentry,  the  wealthier  mer- 
chants, the  great  mass  of  the  people,  found  themselves 
thrown  by  the  very  instinct  of  conservatism  into  opposi- 
tion to  the  Crown.  It  was  only  by  foreign  hirelings  that 
revolt  was  suppressed ;  it  was  only  by  a  reckless  abuse  of 
the  system  of  packing  the  Houses  that  Parliament  could 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  347 

be  held  in  check.  At  last  the  Government  ventured  on  an 
open  defiance  of  law ;  and  a  statute  of  the  realm  was  set 
aside  at  the  imperious  bidding  of  a  boy  of  fifteen.  Master 
of  the  royal  forces,  wielding  at  his  will  the  royal  authority, 
Northumberland  used  the  voice  of  the  dying  Edward  to 
set  aside  rights  of  succession  as  sacred  as  his  own.  But 
the  attempt  proved  an  utter  failure.  The  very  forces  on 
which  the  Duke  relied  turned  against  him.  The  whole 
nation  fronted  him  in  arms.  The  sovereign  whom  tke 
voice  of  the  young  King  named  as  his  successor  passed 
from  the  throne  to  the  Tower,  and  a  sovereign  whose  title 
rested  on  parliamentary  statute  took  her  place. 

At  the  opening  of  August  Mary  entered  London  in 
triumph.  Short  and  thin  in  figure,  with  a  face  drawn 
and  colorless  that  told  of  constant  ill-health,  there  was 
little  in  the  outer  seeming  of  the  new  queen  to  recall  her 
father;  but  her  hard,  bright  eyes,  her  manlike  voice,  her 
fearlessness  and  self-will,  told  of  her  Tudor  blood,  as  her 
skill  in  music,  her  knowledge  of  languages,  her  love  of 
learning,  spoke  of  the  culture  and  refinement  of  Henry's 
Court.  Though  Mary  was  thirty-seven  years  old,  the  strict 
retirement  in  which  she  had  lived  had  left  her  as  ignorant 
of  the  actual  temper  of  England  as  England  was  ignorant 
of  her  own.  She  had  founded  her  resistance  to  the  changes 
of  the  Protectorate  on  a  resolve  to  adhere  to  her  father's 
system  till  her  brother  came  of  age  to  rule,  and  England 
believed  her  to  be  longing  like  itself  simply  for  a  restora- 
tion of  what  Henry  had  left.  The  belief  was  confirmed 
by  her  earlier  actions.  The  changes  of  the  Protectorate 
were  treated  as  null  and  void.  Gardiner,  Henry's  minis- 
ter, was  drawn  from  the  Tower  to  take  the  lead  as  Chan- 
cellor at  the  Queen's  Council-board.  Bonner  and  the  de- 
posed bishops  were  restored  to  their  sees.  Ridley  with  the 
others  who  had  displaced  them  were  again  expelled.  Lati- 
mer,  as  a  representative  of  the  extreme  Protestants,  was 
sent  to  the  Tower;  and  the  foreign  refugees,  as  anti-sacra- 
mentarians,  were  ordered  to  leave  England.  On  an  indig- 


248  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.  'm  [BOOK  VI. 

nant  protest  from  Cranmer  against  reports  that  he  was 
ready  to  abandon  the  new  reforms  the  Archbishop  was  sent 
for  his  seditious  demeanor  to  the  Tower,  and  soon  put  on 
his  trial  for  treason  with  Lady  Jane  Grey,  her  husband, 
and  two  of  his  brothers.  Each  pleaded  guilty;  but  no  at- 
tempt was  made  to  carry  out  the  sentence  of  death.  In  all 
this  England  went  with  the  Queen.  The  popular  enthusi- 
asm hardly  waited  in  fact  for  the  orders  of  the  Govern- 
ment. The  whole  system  which  had  been  pursued  during 
Edward's  reign  fell  with  a  sudden  crash.  London  indeed 
retained  much  of  its  Protestant  sympathy,  but  over  the 
rest  of  the  country  the  tide  of  reaction  swept  without 
a  check.  The  married  priests  were  driven  from  their 
churches,  the  images  were  replaced.  In  many  parishes 
the  new  Prayer-book  was  set  aside  and  the  mass  restored. 
The  Parliament  which  met  in  October  annulled  the  laws 
made  respecting  religion  during  the  past  reign,  and  re- 
established the  form  of  service  as  used  in  the  last  year  of 
Henry  the  Eighth. 

Up  to  this  point  the  temper  of  England  went  fairly  with 
that  of  the  Queen.  But  there  were  from  the  first  signs  of 
a  radical  difference  between  the  aim  of  Mary  and  that  of 
her  people.  With  the  restoration  of  her  father's  system 
the  nation  as  a  whole  was  satisfied.  Mary  on  the  other 
hand  looked  on  such  a  restoration  simply  as  a  step  toward 
a  complete  revival  of  the  system  which  Henry  had  done 
away.  Through  long  years  of  suffering  and  peril  her 
fanaticism  had  been  patiently  brooding  over  the  hope  of 
restoring  to  England  its  older  religion.  She  believed,  as 
she  said  at  a  later  time  to  the  Parliament,  that  "  she  had 
been  predestiaed  and  preserved  by  God  to  the  succession  of 
the  Crown  for  no  other  end  save  that  He  might  make  use 
of  her  above  all  else  in  the  bringing  back  of  the  realm  to 
the  Catholic  faith."  Her  zeal  however  was  checked  by  the 
fact  that  she  stood  almost  alone  in  her  aim,  as  well  as  by 
cautious  advice  from  her  cousin,  the  Emperor;  and  she 
assured  the  Londoners  that  "albeit  her  own  conscience 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  242 

was  stayed  in  matters  of  religion,  yet  she  meant  not  to 
compel  or  strain  men's  consciences  otherwise  than  God 
should,  as  she  trusted,  put  in  their  hearts  a  persuasion  of 
the  truth  that  she  was  in,  through  the  opening  of  his  word 
unto  them  by  godly,  and  virtuous,  and  learned  preachers." 
She  had  in  fact  not  ventured  as  yet  to  refuse  the  title  of 
"  Head  of  the  Church  next  under  God"  or  to  disclaim  the 
powers  which  the  Act  of  Supremacy  gave  her;  on  the 
contrary  she  used  these  powers  in  the  regulation  of  preach- 
ing as  her  father  had  used  them.  The  strenuous  resistance 
with  which  her  proposal  to  set  aside  the  new  Prayer  Book 
was  met  in  Parliament  warned  her  of  the  difficulties  that 
awaited  any  projects  of  radical  change.  The  proposal  was 
carried,  but  only  after  a  hot  conflict  which  lasted  over  six 
days  and  which  left  a  third  of  the  Lower  House  still  op- 
posed to  it.  Their  opposition  by  no  means  implied  ap- 
proval of  the  whole  series  of  religious  changes  of  which 
the  Prayer  Book  formed  a  part,  for  the  more  moderate 
Catholics  were  pleading  at  this  time  for  prayers  in  the 
vulgar  tongue,  and  on  this  question  followers  of  More  and 
Colet  might  have  voted  with  the  followers  of  Cranmer. 
But  it  showed  how  far  men's  minds  were  from  any  spirit 
of  blind  reaction  or  blind  compliance  with  the  royal  will. 

The  temper  of  the  Parliament  indeed  was  very  different 
from  that  of  the  Houses  which  had  knelt  before  Henry  the 
Eighth.  If  it  consented  to  repeal  the  enactment  which 
rendered  her  mother's  marriage  invalid  and  to  declare 
Mary  "born  in  lawful  matrimony,"  it  secured  the  aboli- 
tion of  all  the  new  treasons  and  felonies  created  in  the  two 
last  reigns.  The  demand  for  their  abolition  showed  that 
jealousy  of  the  growth  of  civil  tyranny  had  now  spread 
from  the  minds  of  philosophers  like  More  to  the  minds  of 
common  Englishmen.  Still  keener  was  the  jealousy  of 
any  marked  revolution  in  the  religious  system  which 
Henry  had  established.  The  wish  to  return  to  the  obedi- 
ence of  Rome  lingered  indeed  among  some  of  the  clergy 
and  in  the  northern  shires.  But  elsewhere  the  system  of 


250  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

a  national  Church  was  popular,  and  it  was  backed  by  the 
existence  of  a  large  and  influential  class  who  had  been  en- 
riched by  the  abbey  lands.  Forty  thousand  families  had 
profited  by  the  spoil,  and  watched  anxiously  any  approach 
of  danger  to  their  new  possessions,  such  as  submission  to 
the  Papacy  was  likely  to  bring  about.  On  such  a  submis- 
sion however  Mary  was  resolved:  and  it  was  to  gain 
strength  for  such  a  step  that  she  determined  to  seek  a  hus- 
band from  her  mother's  house.  The  policy  of  Ferdinand 
of  Aragon,  so  long  held  at  bay  by  adverse  fortune,  was 
now  to  find  its  complete  fulfilment.  To  one  line  of  the 
house  of  Austria,  that  of  Charles  the  Fifth,  had  fallen  not 
only  the  Imperial  Crown  but  the  great  heritage  of  Bur- 
gundy, Aragon,  Naples,  Castile,  and  the  Castilian  de- 
pendencies in  the  New  World.  To  a  second,  that  of  the 
Emperor's  brother  Ferdinand,  had  fallen  the  Austrian 
duchies,  Bohemia  and  Hungary.  The  marriage  of  Cath- 
arine was  now,  as  it  seemed,  to  bear  its  fruits  by  the  union 
of  Mary  with  a  son  of  Charles,  and  the  placing  a  third 
Austrian  line  upon  the  throne  of  England.  The  gigantic 
scheme  of  bringing  all  western  Europe  together  under  the 
rule  of  a  single  family  seemed  at  last  to  draw  to  its  realiza- 
tion. 

It  was  no  doubt  from  political  as  well  as  religious  mo- 
tives that  Mary  set  her  heart  on  this  union.  Her  rejection 
of  Gardiner's  proposal  that  she  should  marry  the  young 
Courtenay,  Earl  of  Devon,  a  son  of  the  Marquis  of  Exeter 
whom  Henry  had  beheaded,  the  resolve  which  she  ex- 
pressed to  wed  "no  subject,  no  Englishman,"  was  founded 
in  part  on  the  danger  to  her  throne  from  the  pretensions  of 
Mary  Stuart,  whose  adherents  cared  little  for  the  exclusion 
of  the  Scotch  line  from  the  succession  by  Henry's  will  and 
already  alleged  the  illegitimate  births  of  both  Mary  Tudor 
and  Elizabeth  through  the  annulling  of  their  mothers' 
marriages  as  a  ground  for  denying  their  right  to  the  throne. 
Such  claims  became  doubly  formidable  through  the  mar- 
riage of  Mary  Stuart  with  the  heir  of  the  French  Crown. 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  251 

and  the  virtual  union  of  both  Scotland  and  France  in  this 
claimant's  hands.  It  was  only  to  Charles  that  the  Queen 
could  look  for  aid  against  such  a  pressure  as  this,  and 
Charles  was  forced  to  give  her  aid.  His  old  dreams  of  a 
mastery  of  the  world  had  faded  away  before  the  stern 
realities  of  the  Peace  of  Passau  and  his  repulse  from  the 
walls  of  Metz.  His  hold  over  the  Empire  was  broken. 
France  was  more  formidable  than  ever.  To  crown  his 
difficulties  the  growth  of  heresy  and  of  the  spirit  of  inde^ 
pendence  in  the  Netherlands  threatened  to  rob  him  of  the 
finest  part  of  the  Burgundian  heritage.  With  Mary  Stu- 
art once  on  the  English  throne,  and  the  great  island  of  the 
west  knit  to  the  French  monarchy,  the  balance  of  power 
would  be  utterly  overthrown,  the  Low  Countries  lost,  and 
the  Imperial  Crown,  as  it  could  hardly  be  doubted,  reft 
from  the  house  of  Austria.  He  was  quick  therefore  to 
welcome  the  Queen's  advances,  and  to  offer  his  son  Philip, 
who  though  not  yet  thirty  had  been  twice  a  widower,  as  a 
candidate  for  her  hand. 

The  offer  came  weighted  with  a  heavy  bribe.  The  keen 
foresight  of  the  Emperor  already  saw  the  difficulty  of  hold- 
ing the  Netherlands  in  union  with  the  Spanish  monarchy ; 
and  while  Spain,  Naples,  and  Franche  Comte  descended  to 
Philip's  eldest  son,  Charles  promised  the  heritage  of  the 
Low  Countries  with  England  to  the  issue  of  Philip  and 
Mary.  He  accepted  too  the  demand  of  Gardiner  and  the 
Council  that  in  the  event  of  such  a  union  England  should 
preserve  complete  independence  both  of  policy  and  action. 
In  any  case  the  marriage  would  save  England  from  the 
grasp  of  France,  and  restore  it,  as  the  Emperor  hinted,  to 
the  obedience  of  the  Church.  But  the  project  was  hardly 
declared  when  it  was  met  by  an  outburst  of  popular  in- 
dignation. Gardiner  himself  was  against  a  union  that 
would  annul  the  national  independence  which  had  till  now 
been  the  aim  of  Tudor  policy,  and  that  would  drag  Eng- 
land helplessly  in  the  wake  of  the  House  of  Austria.  The 
mass  of  conservative  Englishmen  shrank  from  the  relig- 


252  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

ious  aspects  of  the  marriage.  For  the  Emperor  had  now 
ceased  to  be  an  object  of  hope  of  confidence  as  a  mediator 
who  would  at  once  purify  the  Church  from  abuses,  and 
restore  the  unity  of  Christendom ;  he  had  ranged  himself 
definitely  on  the  side  of  the  Papacy  and  of  the  Council  of 
Trent ;  and  the  cruelties  of  the  Inquisition  which  he  had 
introduced  into  Flanders  gave  a  terrible  indication  of  the 
bigotry  which  he  was  to  bequeath  to  his  House.  The 
marriage  with  Philip  meant,  it  could  hardly  be  doubted,  a 
submission  to  the  Papacy,  and  an  undoing  not  only  of  the 
religious  changes  of  Edward  but  of  the  whole  system  of 
Henry.  Loyal  and  conservative  as  was  the  temper  of  the 
Parliament,  it  was  at  one  in  its  opposition  to  a  Spanish 
marriage  and  in  the  request  which  it  made  through  a 
deputation  of  its  members  to  the  Queen  that  she  would 
marry  an  Englishman.  The  request  was  a  new  step  for- 
ward on  the  part  of  the  Houses  to  the  recovery  of  their  older 
rights.  Already  called  by  Cromwell's  policy  to  more  than 
their  old  power  in  ecclesiastical  matters,  their  dread  of 
revolutionary  change  pushed  them  to  an  intervention  in 
matters  of  state.  Mary  noted  the  advance  with  all  a 
Tudor's  jealousy.  She  interrupted  the  speaker;  she  re- 
buked the  Parliament  for  taking  too  much  on  itself ;  she 
declared  she  would  take  counsel  on  such  a  matter  "  with 
God  and  with  none  other."  But  the  remonstrance  had 
been  made,  the  interference  was  to  serve  as  a  precedent  in 
the  reign  to  come,  and  a  fresh  proof  had  been  given  that 
Parliament  was  no  longer  the  slavish  tool  of  the  Crown. 

But  while  the  nation  grumbled  and  the  Parliament  re- 
monstrated, one  party  in  the  realm  was  filled  with  absolute 
panic  by  the  news  of  the  Spanish  match.  The  Protestants 
saw  in  the  marriage  not  only  the  final  overthrow  of  their  re- 
ligious hopes,  but  a  close  of  the  religious  truce,  and  an  open- 
ing of  persecution.  The  general  opposition  to  the  match, 
with  the  dread  of  the  holders  of  Church  lands  that  their 
possessions  were  in  danger,  encouraged  the  more  violent  to 
plan  a  rising;  and  France,  naturally  jealous  of  an  increase 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  253 

of  power  by  its  great  opponent,  promised  to  support  them 
by  an  incursion  from  Scotland  and  an  attack  on  Calais. 
The  real  aim  of  the  rebellion  was,  no  doubt,  the  displace- 
ment of  Mary,  and  the  setting  either  of  Jane  Grey,  or,  as 
the  bulk  of  the  Protestants  desired,  of  Elizabeth,  on  the 
throne.  But  these  hopes  were  cautiously  hidden ;  and  the 
conspirators  declared  their  aim  to  be  that  of  freeing  the 
Queen  from  evil  counsellors,  and  of  preventing  her  union 
with  the  Prince  of  Spain.  The  plan  combined  three  simul- 
taneous outbreaks  of  revolt.  Sir  Peter  Carew  engaged  to 
raise  the  west,  the  Duke  of  Suffolk  to  call  the  midland  coun- 
ties to  arms,  while  Sir  Thomas  Wyatt  led  the  Kentishmen 
on  London.  The  rising  was  planned  for  the  spring  of 
1554.  But  the  vigilance  of  the  Government  drove  it  to  a 
premature  explosion  in  January,  and  baffled  it  in  the  centre 
and  the  west.  Carew  fled  to  France;  Suffolk,  who  ap* 
peared  in  arms  at  Leicester,  found  small  response  from 
the  people  and  was  soon  sent  prisoner  to  the  Tower.  The 
Kentish  rising  however  proved  a  more  formidable  danger. 
A  cry  that  the  Spaniards  were  coming  "to  conquer  the 
realm"  drew  thousands  to  Wyatt's  standard.  The  ships 
in  the  Thames  submitted  to  be  seized  by  the  insurgents. 
A  party  of  the  train-bands  of  London,  who  marched  with 
the  royal  guard  under  the  old  Duke  of  Norfolk  against 
them,  deserted  to  the  rebels  in  a  mass  with  shouts  of  "  A 
Wyatt !  a  Wyatt !  we  are  all  Englishmen !" 

Had  the  Kentishmen  moved  quickly  on  the  capital,  its 
gates  would  have  been  flung  open  and  success  would  have 
been  assured.  But  at  the  critical  moment  Mary  was  saved 
by  her  queenly  courage.  Riding  boldly  to  the  Guildhall 
she  appealed  with  "  a  man's  voice"  to  the  loyalty  of  the 
citizens,  and  denounced  the  declaration  of  Wyatt's  follow- 
ers as  "  a  Spanish  cloak  to  cover  their  purpose  against  our 
religion."  She  pledged  herself,  "on  the  word  of  a  Queen, 
that  if  it  shall  not  probably  appear  to  all  the  nobility  and 
commons  in  the  high  court  of  Parliament  that  this  mar- 
riage shall  be  for  the  high  benefit  and  commodity  of  all  the 


254  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

whole  realm,  then  will  I  abstain  from  marriage  while  I 
live."  The  pledge  was  a  momentous  one,  for  it  owned  the 
very  claim  of  the  two  Houses  which  the  Queen  had  till  now 
haughtily  rejected ;  and  with  the  remonstrance  of  the  Par- 
liament still  fresh  in  their  ears  the  Londoners  may  well 
have  believed  that  the  marriage-project  would  come  quietly 
to  an  end.  The  dread  too  of  any  change  in  religion  by  the 
return  of  the  violent  Protestantism  of  Edward's  day  could 
hardly  fail  to  win  Mary  support  among  the  citizens.  The 
mayor  answered  for  their  loyalty,  and  when  Wyatt  ap- 
peared on  the  Southwark  bank  the  bridge  was  secured 
against  him.  But  the  rebel  leader  knew  that  the  issue  of 
the  revolt  hung  on  the  question  which  side  London  would 
take,  and  that  a  large  part  of  the  Londoners  favored  his 
cause.  Marching  therefore  up  the  Thames  he  seized  a 
bridge  at  Kingston,  threw  his  force  across  the  river,  and 
turned  rapidly  back  on  the  capital.  But  a  night  march 
along  miry  roads  wearied  and  disorganized  his  men ;  the 
bulk  of  them  were  cut  off  from  their  leader  by  a  royal  fore© 
which  had  gathered  in  the  fields  at  what  is  now  Hyde 
Park  Corner,  and  only  Wyatt  himself  with  a  handful  of 
followers  pushed  desperately  on  past  the  palace  of  St. 
James,  whence  the  Queen  refused  to  fly  even  while  the 
rebels  were  marching  beneath  its  walls,  along  the  Strand 
to  Ludgate.  "  I  have  kept  touch,"  he  cried  as  he  sank  ex- 
hausted at  the  gate.  But  it  was  closed:  his  adherents 
within  were  powerless  to  effect  their  promised  diversion  in 
his  favor ;  and  as  he  fell  back  the  daring  leader  was  sur- 
rounded at  Temple  Bar  and  sent  to  the  Tower. 

The  failure  of  the  revolt  was  fatal  to  the  girl  whom  par] 
at  least  of  the  rebels  would  have  placed  on  the  throne. 
Lady  Jane  Grey,  who  had  till  now  been  spared  and  treated 
with  great  leniency,  was  sent  to  the  block ;  and  her  father, 
her  husband,  and  her  uncle,  atoned  for  the  ambition  of  the 
House  of  Suffolk  by  the  death  of  traitors.  Wyatt  and  his 
chief  adherents  followed  them  to  execution,  while  the 
bodies  of  the  poorer  insurgents  were  dangling  on  gibbets 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  255 

round  London.  Elizabeth,  who  had  with  some  reason 
been  suspected  of  complicity  in  the  insurrection,  was  sent 
to  the  Tower ;  and  only  saved  from  death  by  the  interposi- 
tion of  the  Council.  The  leading  Protestants  fled  in  terror 
over  sea.  But  the  failure  of  the  revolt  did  more  than  crush 
the  Protestant  party ;  it  enabled  the  Queen  to  lay  aside  the 
mask  of  moderation  which  had  been  forced  on  her  by  the 
earlier  difficulties  of  her  reign.  An  order  for  the  expulsion 
of  all  married  clergy  from  their  cures,  with  the  deprivation 
of  nine  bishops  who  had  been  appointed  during  the  Pro- 
tectorate and  who  represented  its  religious  tendencies, 
proved  the  Queen's  resolve  to  enter  boldly  on  a  course  of 
reaction.  ^Her  victory  secured  the  Spanish  marriage.  It 
was  to  prevent  Philip's  union  to  Mary  that  Wyatt  had 
risen,  and  with  his  overthrow  the  Queen's  policy  stood 
triumphant.  The  whole  strength  of  the  conservative  op- 
position was  lost  when  opposition  could  be  branded  as  dis- 
loyalty. Mary  too  was  true  to  the  pledge  she  had  given 
that  the  match  should  only  be  brought  about  with  the  as- 
sent of  Parliament.  But  pressure  was  unscrupulously  used 
to  secure  compliant  members  in  the  new  elections,  and 
a  reluctant  assent  to  the  marriage  was  wrung  from  the 
Houses  when  they  assembled  in  the  spring.  Philip  was 
created  king  of  Naples  by  his  father  to  give  dignity  to  his 
union ;  and  in  the  following  July  Mary  met  him  at  Win- 
chester and  became  his  wife. 

As  he  entered  London  with  the  Queen,  men  noted  curi- 
ously the  look  of  the  young  King  whose  fortunes  were  to 
be  so  closely  linked  with  those  of  England  for  fifty  years 
to  come.  Far  younger  than  his  bride,  for  he  was  but 
twenty-six,  there  was  little  of  youth  in  the  small  and 
fragile  frame,  the  sickly  face,  the  sedentary  habits,  the 
Spanish  silence  and  reserve,  which  estranged  Englishmen 
from  Philip  as  they  had  already  estranged  his  subjects  in 
Italy  and  his  future  subjects  in  the  Netherlands.  Here 
however  he  sought  by  an  unusual  pleasantness  of  demeanor 
as  well  as  by  profuse  distributions  of  gifts  to  win  the  na- 


256  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

tional  good  will,  for  it  was  only  by  winning  it  that  he  could 
accomplish  the  work  he  came  to  do.  His  first  aim  was  to 
reconcile  England  with  the  Church.  The  new  Spanish 
marriage  was  to  repair  the  harm  which  the  earlier  Spanish 
marriage  had  brought  about  by  securing  that  submission 
to  Rome  on  which  Mary  was  resolved.  Even  before 
Philip's  landing  in  England  the  great  obstacle  to  reunion 
had  been  removed  by  the  consent  of  Julius  the  Third  un- 
der pressure  from  the  Emperor  to  waive  the  restoration  of 
the  Church-lands  in  the  event  of  England's  return  to 
obedience.  Other  and  almost  as  great  obstacles  indeed 
seemed  to  remain.  The  temper  of  the  nation  had  gone 
with  Henry  in  his  rejection  of  the  Papal  jurisdiction. 
Mary's  counsellors  had  been  foremost  among  the  men  who 
advocated  the  change.  Her  minister,  Bishop  Gardiner, 
seemed  pledged  to  oppose  any  submission  to  Rome.  As 
secretary  of  state  after  Wolsey's  fall  he  had  taken  a  promi- 
nent part  in  the  measures  which  brought  about  a  severance 
between  England  and  the  Papacy ;  as  Bishop  of  Winchester 
he  had  written  a  famous  tract  "  On  True  Obedience"  in 
which  the  Papal  supremacy  had  been  expressly  repudiated ; 
and  to  the  end  of  Henry's  days  he  had  been  looked  upon 
as  the  leading  advocate  of  the  system  of  a  national  and  in- 
dependent Church.  Nor  had  his  attitude  changed  in  Ed- 
ward's reign.  In  the  process  for  his  deprivation  he  avowed 
himself  ready  as  ever  to  maintain  as  well  "  the  supremacy 
and  supreme  authority  of  the  King's  majesty  that  now  is 
as  the  abolishing  of  the  usurped  power  of  the  Bishop  of 
Rome." 

But  with  the  later  changes  of  the  Protectorate  Gardiner 
had  seen  his  dream  of  a  national  yet  orthodox  Church 
vanish  away.  He  had  seen  how  inevitably  severance 
from  Rome  drew  with  it  a  connection  with  the  Protestant 
Churches  and  a  repudiation  of  Catholic  belief.  In  the 
hours  of  imprisonment  his  mind  fell  back  on  the  old  ec- 
clesiastical order  with  which  the  old  spiritual  order  seemed 
inextricably  entwined,  and  he  was  ready  now  to  submit  to 


CHA1-.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1608.  257 

the  Papacy  as  the  one  means  of  preserving  the  faith  to 
which  he  clung.  His  attitude  was  of  the  highest  signifi- 
cance, for  Gardiner  more  than  any  one  was  a  representative 
of  the  dominant  English  opinion  of  his  day.  As  the 
moderate  party  which  had  supported  the  policy  of  Henry 
the  Eighth  saw  its  hopes  disappear,  it  ranged  itself,  like 
the  Bishop,  on  the  side  of  a  unity  which  could  now  only 
be  brought  about  by  reconciliation  with  Rome.  The  effort 
of  the  Protestants  in  Wyatt's  insurrection  to  regain  their 
power  and  revive  the  system  of  the  Protectorate  served 
only  to  give  a  fresh  impulse  to  this  drift  of  conservative 
opinion.  Mary  therefore  found  little  opposition  to  her 
plans.  The  peers  were  won  over  by  Philip  through  the 
pensions  he  lavished  among  them,  while  pressure  was  un- 
scrupulously used  by  the  Council  to  secure  a  compliant 
House  of  Commons.  When  the  Parliament  met  in  No- 
vember these  measures  were  found  to  have  boen  successful. 
The  attainder  of  Reginald  Pole,  who  had  been  appointed 
by  the  Pope  to  receive  the  submission  of  the  realm,  was 
reversed ;  and  the  Legate  entered  London  by  the  river  with 
his  cross  gleaming  from  the  prow  of  his  barge.  He  was 
solemnly  welcomed  in  full  Parliament.  The  two  Houses 
decided  by  a  formal  vote  to  return  to  the  obedience  of  the 
Papal  See;  on  the  assurance  of  Pole  in  the  Pope's  name 
that  holders  of  church-lands  should  not  be  disturbed  in 
their  possession  the  statutes  abolishing  Papal  jurisdiction 
in  England  were  repealed ;  and  Lords  and  Commons  re- 
ceived on  their  knees  an  absolution  which  freed  the  realm 
from  the  guilt  incurred  by  its  schism  and  heresy. 

But,  even  in  the  hour  of  her  triumph,  the  temper  both 
of  Parliament  and  the  nation  warned  the  Queen  of  the 
failure  of  her  hope  to  bind  England  to  a  purely  Catholic 
policy.  The  growing  independence  of  the  two  Houses  was 
seen  in  the  impossibility  of  procuring  from  them  any 
change  in  the  order  of  succession.  The  victory  of  Rome 
was  incomplete  so  long  as  its  right  of  dispensation  was 
implicitly  denied  by  a  recognition  of  Elizabeth's  legiti- 


258  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

macy,  and  Mary  longed  to  avenge  her  mother  by  humbling 
the  child  of  Anne  Boleyn.  But  in  spite  of  Pole's  efforts 
and  the  Queen's  support  a  proposal  to  oust  her  sister  from 
the  line  of  succession  could  not  even  be  submitted  to  the 
Houses,  nor  could  their  assent  be  won  to  the  postponing 
the  succession  of  Elizabeth  to  that  of  Philip.  The  temper 
of  the  nation  at  large  was  equally  decided.  In  the  first 
Parliament  of  Mary  a  proposal  to  renew  the  laws  against 
heresy  had  been  thrown  out  by  the  Lords,  even  after  the 
failure  of  Wyatt's  insurrection.  Philip's  influence  secured 
the  re-enactment  of  the  statute  of  Henry  the  Fifth  in  the 
Parliament  which  followed  his  arrival ;  but  the  sullen  dis- 
content of  London  compelled  its  Bishop,  Bonner,  to  with- 
draw a  series  of  articles  of  inquiry,  by  which  he  hoped  to 
purge  his  diocese  of  heresy,  and  even  the  Council  was  di- 
vided on  the  question  of  persecution.  In  the  very  interests 
of  Catholicism  the  Emperor  himself  counselled  prudence 
and  delay.  Philip  gave  the  same  counsel.  From  the  mo- 
ment of  his  arrival  the  young  King  exercised  a  powerful 
influence  over  the  Government,  and  he  was  gradually 
drawing  into  his  hands  the  whole  direction  of  affairs.  But 
bigot  as  he  was  in  matters  of  faith,  Philip's  temper  was 
that  of  a  statesman,  not  of  a  fanatic.  If  he  came  to  Eng- 
land resolute  to  win  the  country  to  union  with  the  Church 
his  conciliatory  policy  was  already  seen  in  the  concessions 
he  wrested  from  the  Papacy  in  the  matter  of  the  Church- 
lands,  and  his  aim  was  rather  to  hold  England  together 
and  to  give  time  for  a  reaction  of  opinion  than  to  revive 
the  old  discord  by  any  measures  of  severity.  It  was  in- 
deed only  from  a  united  and  contented  England  that  he 
could  hope  for  effective  aid  in  the  struggle  of  his  house 
with  France,  and  in  spite  of  his  pledges  Philip's  one  aim 
in  marrying  Mary  was  to  secure  that  aid. 

But  whether  from  without  or  from  within  warning  was 
wasted  on  the  fierce  bigotry  of  the  Queen.  It  was,  as 
Gardiner  asserted,  not  at  the  counsel  of  her  ministers  but 
by  her  own  personal  will  that  the  laws  against  heresy  had 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  259 

been  laid  before  Parliament ;  ar.d  now  that  they  were  en- 
acted Mary  pressed  for  their  execution.  Her  resolve  was 
probably  quickened  by  the  action  of  the  Protestant  zealots. 
The  failure  of  Wyatt's  revolt  was  far  from  taming  the  en- 
thusiasm of  the  wilder  reformers.  The  restoration  of  the 
old  worship  was  followd  by  outbreaks  of  bold  defiance.  A 
tailor  of  St.  Giles  in  the  Fields  shaved  a  dog  with  a  priestly 
tonsure.  A  cat  was  found  hanging  in  the  Cheap  "  with 
her  head  shorn,  and  the  likeness  of  a  vestment  cast  over 
her,  with  her  forefeet  tied  together  and  a  round  piece  of 
paper  like  a  singing  cake  between  them."  Yet  more  gall- 
ing were  the  ballads  which  were  circulated  in  mockery  of 
the  mass,  the  pamphlets  which  came  from  the  exiles  over 
sea,  the  seditious  broadsides  dropped  in,  the  streets,  the  in- 
terludes in  which  the  most  sacred  acts  of  the  old  religion 
were  flouted  with  ribald  mockery.  All  this  defiance  only 
served  to  quicken  afresh  the  purpose  of  the  Queen.  But  it 
was  not  till  the  opening  of  1555,  when  she  had  already 
been  a  year  and  a  half  on  the  throne,  that  the  opposition 
of  her  councillors  was  at  last  mastered  and  the  persecution 
began.  In  February  the  deprived  bishop  of  Gloucester, 
Hooper,  was  burned  in  his  cathedral  city,  a  London  vicar, 
Lawrence  Saunders,  at  Coventry,  and  Rogers,  a  preben- 
dary of  St.  Paul's,  at  London.  Ferrar,  the  deprived 
bishop  of  St.  David's,  who  was  burned  at  Caermarthen, 
was  one  of  eight  victims  who  suffered  in  March.  Four 
followed  in  April  and  May,  six  in  June,  eleven  in  July, 
eighteen  in  August,  eleven  in  September.  In  October 
Ridley,  the  deprived  bishop  of  London,  was  drawn  with 
Latimer  from  their  prison  at  Oxford.  "Play  the  man, 
Master  Ridley !"  cried  the  old  preacher  of  the  Reformation 
as  the  flames  shot  up  around  him;  "we  shall  this  day 
light  up  such  a  candle  by  God's  grace  in  England  as  I 
trust  shall  never  be  put  out." 

If  the  Protestants  had  not  known  how  to  govern  indeed 
they  knew  how  to  die ;  and  the  cause  which  prosperity  had 
ruined  revived  in  the  dark  hour  of  persecution.  The 


260  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

memory  of  their  violence  and  greed  faded  away  as  they 
passed  unwavering  to  their  doom.  Such  a  story  as  that 
of  Rowland  Taylor,  the  Vicar  of  Hadleigh,  tells  us  more 
of  the  work  which  was  now  begun,  and  of  the  effect  it  was 
likely  to  produce,  than  pages  of  historic  dissertation. 
Taylor,  who  as  a  man  of  mark  had  been  one  of  the  first  vic- 
tims chosen  for  execution,  was  arrested  in  London,  and  con- 
demned to  suffer  in  his  own  parish.  His  wife,  "  suspect- 
ing that  her  husband  should  that  night  be  carried  away," 
had  waited  through  the  darkness  with  her  children  in  the 
porch  of  St.  Botolph's  beside  Aldgate.  "  Now  when  the 
sheriff  his  company  came  against  St.  Botolph's  Church 
Elizabeth  cried,  saying,  'O  my  dear  father!  Mother! 
mother !  here  is  my  father  led  away !'  Then  cried  his  wife, 
*  Rowland,  Rowland,  where  art  thou?' — for  it  was  a  very 
dark  morning,  that  the  one  could  not  see  the  other.  Dr. 
Taylor  answered,  'lam  here,  dear  wife,'  and  stayed.  The 
sheriff's  men  would  have  led  him  forth,  but  the  sheriff  said, 
'Stay  a  little,  masters,  I  pray  you,  and  let  him  speak  to  his 
wife.'  Then  came  she  to  him,  and  he  took  his  daughter 
Mary  in  his  arms,  and  he  and  his  wife  and  Elizabeth  knelt 
down  and  said  the  Lord's  prayer.  At  which  sight  the 
sheriff  wept  apace,  and  so  did  divers  others  of  the  com- 
pany. Aftei  they  had  prayed  he  rose  up  and  kissed  his 
wife  and  shook  her  by  the  hand,  and  said,  'Farewell,  my 
dear  wife,  be  of  good  comfort,  for  I  am  quiet  in  my  con- 
science! God  shall  still  be  a  father  to  my  children. '  .  .  . 
Then  said  his  wife,  'God  be  with  thee,  dear  Rowland!  I 
will,  with  God's  grace,  meet  thee  at  Hadleigh.' 

"  All  the  way  Dr.  Taylor  was  merry  and  cheerful  as  one 
that  accounted  himself  going  to  a  most  pleasant  banquet 
or  bridal.  .  .  .  Coming  within  two  miles  of  Hadleigh  he 
desired  to  light  off  his  horse,  which  done  he  leaped  and  set 
a  frisk  or  twain  as  men  commonly  do  for  dancing.  'Why, 
master  Doctor,'  quoth  the  Sheriff,  'how  do  you  now?'  He 
answered,  'Well,  God  be  praised,  Master  Sheriff,  never 
better;  for  now  I  know  I  am  almost  at  home.  I  lack  not 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  261 

past  two  stiles  to  go  over,  and  I  am  even  at  my  Father's 
house!'  .  .  .  The  streets  of  Hadleigh  were  beset  on  both 
sides  with  men  and  women  of  the  town  and  country  who 
waited  to  see  him ;  whom  when  they  beheld  so  led  to  death* 
with  weeping  eyes  and  lamentable  voices,  they  cried,  'Ah, 
good  Lord!  there  goeth  our  good  shepherd  from  us!'"  The 
journey  was  at  last  over.  "  'What  place  is  this, '  he  asked, 
'and  what  meaneth  it  that  so  much  people  are  gathered  to- 
gether?' It  was  answered,  'It  is  Oldham  Common,  the 
place  where  you  must  suffer,  and  the  people  are  come  to 
look  upon  you.'  Then  said  he,  'Thanked  be  God,  I  am 
even  at  home!'  .  .  .  But  when  the  people  saw  his  rev- 
erend and  ancient  face,  with  a  long  white  beard,  they  burst 
out  with  weeping  tears  and  cried,  saying,  'God  save  thee, 
good  Dr.  Taylor ;  God  strengthen  thee  and  help  thee ;  the 
Holy  Ghost  comfort  thee!'  He  wished,  but  was  not  suf- 
fered, to  speak.  When  he  had  prayed,  he  went  to  the 
stake  and  kissed  it,  and  set  himself  into  a  pitch -barrel 
which  they  had  set  for  him  to  stand  on,  and  so  stood  with 
his  back  upright  against  the  stake,  with  his  hands  folded 
together  and  his  eyes  toward  heaven,  and  so  let  himself 
be  burned."  One  of  the  executioners  "  cruelly  cast  a  fagot 
at  him,  which  hit  upon  his  head  and  brake  his  face  that 
the  blood  ran  down  his  visage.  Then  said  Dr.  Taylor,  'O 
friend,  I  have  harm  enough — what  needed  that?'  "  One 
more  act  of  brutality  brought  his  sufferings  to  an  end. 
"  So  stood  he  still  without  either  crying  or  moving,  with 
his  hands  folded  together,  till  Soyce  with  a  halberd  struck 
him  on  the  head  that  the  brains  fell  out,  and  the  dead 
corpse  fell  down  into  the  fire." 

The  terror  of  death  was  powerless  against  men  like  these. 
Bonner,  the  Bishop  of  London,  to  whom,  as  bishop  of  the 
diocese  in  which  the  Council  sat,  its  victims  were  gener- 
ally delivered  for  execution,  but  who,  in  spite  of  the  nick- 
name and  hatred  which  his  official  prominence  in  the  work 
of  death  earned  him,  seems  to  have  been  naturally  a  good- 
humored  and  merciful  man,  asked  a  youth  who  was  brought 


262  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

before  him  whether  he  thought  he  could  bear  the  fire.  The 
boy  at  once  held  his  hand  without  flinching  in  the  flame 
of  a  candle  that  stood  by.  Rogers,  a  fellow- worker  with 
Tyndale  in  the  translation  of  the  Bible,  and  one  of  the 
foremost  among  the  Protestant  preachers,  died  bathing  his 
hands  in  the  flame  "  as  if  it  had  been  in  cold  water. "  Even 
the  commonest  lives  gleamed  for  a  moment  into  poetry  at 
the  stake.  "Pray  for  me,"  a  boy,  William  Brown,  who 
had  been  brought  home  to  Brentwood  to  suffer,  asked  of 
the  bystanders.  "I  will  pray  no  more  for  thee,"  one  of 
them  replied,  "than  I  will  pray  for  a  dog."  "  'Then,'  said 
William,  'Son  of  God,  shine  upon  me;'  and  immediately 
the  sun  in  the  elements  shone  out  of  a  dark  cloud  so  full  in 
his  face  that  he  was  constrained  to  look  another  way; 
whereat  the  people  mused  because  it  was  so  dark  a  little 
time  before."  Brentwood  lay  within  a  district  on  which 
the  hand  of  the  Queen  fell  heavier  than  elsewhere.  The 
persecution  was  mainly  confined  to  the  more  active  and 
populous  parts  of  the  country,  to  London,  Kent,  Sussex, 
and  the  Eastern  Counties.  Of  the  two  hundred  and  eighty 
whom  we  know  to  have  suffered  during  the  last  three  years 
and  a  half  of  Mary's  reign  more  than  forty  were  burned 
in  London,  seventeen  in  the  neighboring  village  of  Strat- 
ford-le-Bow,  four  in  Islington,  two  in  Southwark,  and  one 
each  at  Barnet,  St.  Albans,  and  Ware.  Kent,  at  that  time 
a  home  of  mining  and  manufacturing  industry,  suffered 
as  heavily  as  London.  Of  its  sixty  martyrs  more  than  forty 
were  furnished  by  Canterbury,  which  was  then  but  a  city 
of  some  few  thousand  inhabitants,  and  seven  by  Maidstone. 
The  remaining  eight  suffered  at  Rochester,  Ashford,  and 
Dartford.  Of  the  twenty -five  who  died  in  Sussex  the  little 
town  of  Lewes  sent  seventeen  to  the  fire.  Seventy  were 
contributed  by  the  Eastern  Counties,  the  seat  of  the  woollen 
manufacture.  Beyond  these  districts  executions  were 
rare.  Westward  of  Sussex  we  find  the  record  of  but  a 
dozen  martyrdoms,  six  of  which  were  at  Bristol,  and  four 
at  Salisbury.  Chester  and  Wales  contributed  but  four 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  263 

sufferers  to  the  list.  In  the  Midland  Counties  between 
Thames  and  the  Humber  only  twenty-four  suffered  martyr- 
dom. North  of  the  Humber  we  find  the  names  of  but  two 
Yorkshiremen  burned  at  Bedale. 

But  heavily  as  the  martyrdoms  fell  on  the  district  within 
which  they  were  practically  confined,  and  where  as  we 
may  conclude  Protestantism  was  more  dominant  than  else» 
where,  the  work  of  terror  failed  in  the  very  ends  for  which 
it  was  wrought.  The  old  spirit  of  insolent  defiance,  of 
outrageous  violence,  rose  into  fresh  life  at  the  challenge  of 
persecution.  A  Protestant  hung  a  string  of  puddings 
round  a  priest's  neck  in  derision  of  his  beads.  The  restored 
images  were  grossly  insulted.  The  old  scurrilous  ballads 
against  the  mass  and  relics  were  heard  in  the  streets.  Men 
were  goaded  to  sheer  madness  by  the  bloodshed  and  violence 
about  them.  One  miserable  wretch,  driven  to  frenzy, 
stabbed  the  priest  of  St.  Margaret's  as  he  stood  with  the 
chalice  in  his  hand.  It  was  a  more  formidable  sign  of  the 
times  that  acts  of  violence  such  as  these  no  longer  stirred 
the  people  at  large  to  their  former  resentment.  The  hor- 
ror of  the  persecution  swept  away  all  other  feelings.  Every 
death  at  the  stake  won  hundreds  to  the  cause  for  which 
the  victims  died.  "  You  have  lost  the  hearts  of  twenty 
thousands  that  were  rank  Papists  within  these  twelve 
months,"  a  Protestant  wrote  triumphantly  to  Bonner. 
Bonner  indeed,  who  had  never  been  a  very  zealous  per- 
secutor, was  sick  of  his  work ;  and  the  energy  of  the  bishops 
soon  relaxed.  But  Mary  had  no  thought  of  hesitation  in 
the  course  she  had  entered  on,  and  though  the  Imperial 
ambassador  noted  the  rapid  growth  of  public  discontent 
"rattling  letters"  from  the  council  pressed  the  lagging 
prelates  to  fresh  activity.  Yet  the  persecution  had  hardly 
begun  before  difficulties  were  thickening  round  the  Queen. 
In  her  passionate  longing  for  an  heir  who  would  carry  on 
her  religious  work  Mary  had  believed  herself  to  be  with 
child ;  but  in  the  summer  of  1555  all  hopes  of  any  child- 
birth passed  away,  and  the  overthrow  of  his  projects  for 

J  12  ^     J     VOL.  2 


264  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

the  permanent  acquisition  of  England  to  the  House  of 
Austria  at  once  disenchanted  Philip  with  his  stay  in  the 
realm.  But  even  had  all  gone  well  it  was  impossible  for 
the  King  to  remain  longer  in  England.  He  was  needed  in 
the  Netherlands  to  play  his  part  in  the  memorable  act 
which  was  to  close  the  Emperor's  political  life.  Already 
King  of  Naples  and  Lord  of  Milan,  Philip  received  by  his 
father's  solemn  resignation  on  the  twenty-fifth  of  October 
the  Burgundian  heritage ;  and  a  month  later  Charles  ceded 
to  him  the  crowns  of  Castile  and  Aragon  with  their  de- 
pendencies in  the  New  World  and  in  the  Old.  The  Em- 
pire indeed  passed  to  his  uncle  Ferdinand  of  Austria ;  but 
with  this  exception  the  whole  of  his  father's  vast  domin- 
ions lay  now  in  the  grasp  of  Philip.  Of  the  realms  which 
he  ruled,  England  was  but  one  and  far  from  the  greatest 
one,  and  even  had  he  wished  to  return  his  continued  stay 
there  became  impossible. 

He  was  forced  to  leave  the  direction  of  affairs  to  Car- 
dinal Pole,  who  on  the  death  of  Gardiner  in  November 
1555  took  the  chief  place  in  Council.  At  once  Papal  Le- 
gate and  chief  minister  of  the  Crown,  Pole  carried  on  that 
union  of  the  civil  and  ecclesiastical  authority  which  had 
been  first  seen  in  Wolsey  and  had  formed  the  groundwork 
of  the  system  of  Cromwell.  But  he  found  himself  ham- 
pered by  difficulties  which  even  the  ability  of  Cromwell 
or  Wolsey  could  hardly  have  met.  The  embassy  which 
carried  to  Rome  the  submission  of  the  realm  found  a  fresh 
Pope,  Paul  the  Fourth,  on  the  throne.  His  accession 
marked  the  opening  of  a  new  era  in  the  history  of  the  Pa- 
pacy. Till  now  the  fortunes  of  Catholicism  had  been 
steadily  sinking  to  a  lower  ebb.  With  the  Peace  of  Pas- 
sau  the  Empire  seemed  lost  to  it.  The  new  Protestant 
faith  stood  triumphant  in  the  north  of  Germany,  and  it  was 
already  advancing  to  the  conquest  of  the  south.  The 
nobles  of  Austria  were  forsaking  the  older  religion.  A 
Venetian  ambassador  estimated  the  German  Catholics  at 
little  more  than  a  tenth  of  the  whole  population  of  Ger- 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  265 

many.  Eastward  the  nobles  of  Hungary  and  Poland 
became  Protestants  in  a  mass.  In  the  west  France  was 
yielding  more  and  more  to  heresy,  and  England  had  hardly 
been  rescued  from  it  by  Mary's  accession.  Only  where 
the  dead  hand  of  Spain  lay  heavy,  in  Castile,  in  Aragon, 
or  in  Italy,  was  the  Reformation  thoroughly  crushed  out ; 
and  even  the  dead  hand  of  Spain  failed  to  crush  heresy  in 
the  Low  Countries.  But  at  the  moment  when  ruin  seemed 
certain  the  older  faith  rallied  to  a  new  resistance.  While 
Protestantism  was  degraded  and  weakened  by  the  prostitu- 
tion of  the  Reformation  to  political  ends,  by  the  greed  and 
worthlessness  of  the  German  princes  who  espoused  its 
cause,  by  the  factious  lawlessness  of  the  nobles  in  Poland 
and  the  Huguenots  in  France,  while  it  wasted  its  strength 
in  theological  controversies  and  persecutions,  in  the  bitter 
and  venomous  discussions  between  the  Churches  which 
followed  Luther  and  the  Churches  which  followed  Zwingli 
or  Calvin,  the  great  communion  which  it  assailed  felt  at 
last  the  uses  of  adversity.  The  Catholic  world  rallied 
round  the  Council  of  Trent.  In  the  very  face  of  heresy 
the  Catholic  faith  was  anew  settled  and  denned.  The 
Papacy  was  owned  afresh  as  the  centre  of  Catholic  union. 
The  enthusiasm  of  the  Protestants  was  met  by  a  counter 
enthusiasm  among  their  opponents.  New  religious  orders 
rose  to  meet  the  wants  of  the  day;  the  Capuchins  became 
the  preachers  of  Catholicism,  the  Jesuits  became  not  only 
its  preachers  but  its  directors,  its  schoolmasters,  its  mis- 
sionaries, its  diplomatists.  Their  organization,  their  blind 
obedience,  their  real  ability,  their  fanatical  zeal,  galvanized 
the  pulpit,  the  school,  the  confessional,  into  a  new  life. 

It  was  this  movement,  this  rally  of  Catholicism,  which 
now  placed  its  representative  on  the  Papal  throne.  At  the 
moment  when  Luther  was  first  opening  his  attack  on  the 
Papacy  Giovanni  Caraffa  had  laid  down  his  sees  of  Chieti 
and  Brindisi  to  found  the  order  of  Theatines  in  a  little 
house  on  the  Pincian  Hill.  His  aim  was  the  reformation 
of  the  clergy,  but  the  impulse  which  he  gave  told  on  the 


266  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

growing  fervor  of  the  Catholic  world,  and  its  issue  was 
seen  in  the  institution  of  the  Capuchins  and  the  Jesuits. 
Created  Cardinal  by  Paul  the  Third,  he  found  himself  face 
to  face  with  the  more  liberal  theologians  who  were  longing 
for  a  reconciliation  between  Lutheranism  and  the  Papacy, 
such  as  Contarini  and  Pole,  but  his  violent  orthodoxy  foiled 
their  efforts  in  the  conference  at  Ratisbon,  and  prevailed 
on  the  Pope  to  trust  to  the  sterner  methods  of  the  Inqui- 
sition. As  Caraffa  wielded  its  powers,  the  Inquisition 
spread  terror  throughout  Italy.  At  due  intervals  groups 
of  heretics  were  burned  before  the  Dominican  Church  at 
Rome ;  scholars  like  Peter  Martyr  were  driven  over  sea ; 
and  the  publication  of  an  index  of  prohibited  books  gave 
a  death-blow  to  Italian  literature.  On  the  verge  of  eighty 
the  stern  Inquisitor  became  Pope  as  Paul  the  Fourth.  His 
conception  of  the  Papal  power  was  as  high  as  that  of 
Hildebrand  or  Innocent  the  Third,  and  he  flung  con- 
temptuously aside  the  system  of  compromise  which  his 
predecessor  had  been  brought  to  adopt  by  the  caution  of  the 
Emperor.  "  Charles,"  he  said,  was  a  "  favorer  of  heretics," 
and  he  laid  to  his  charge  the  prosperity  of  Lutheranism  in 
the  Empire.  That  England  should  make  terms  for  its  re- 
turn to  obedience  galled  his  pride,  while  his  fanaticism 
would  hear  of  no  surrender  of  the  property  of  the  Church. 
Philip,  who  had  wrested  the  concession  from  Julius  the 
Third,  had  no  influence  over  a  Pope  who  hoped  to  drive 
the  Spaniards  from  Italy,  and  Pole  was  suspected  by  Paul 
of  a  leaning  to  heresy. 

The  English  ambassadors  found  therefore  a  rough  greet- 
ing when  the  terms  of  the  submission  were  laid  before  the 
Pope.  Paul  utterly  repudiated  the  agreement  which  had 
been  entered  into  between  the  Legate  and  the  Parliament ; 
he  demanded  the  restoration  of  every  acre  of  Church  prop- 
erty ;  and  he  annulled  all  alienation  of  it  by  a  general  bull. 
His  attitude  undid  all  that  Mary  had  done.  In  spite  of  the 
pompous  reconciliation  in  which  the  Houses  had  knelt  at 
the  feet  of  Pole,  England  was  still  unreconciled  to  the 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  267 

Papacy,  for  the  country  and  the  Pope  were  at  issue  on  a 
matter  where  concession  was  now  impossible  on  either  side. 
The  Queen's  own  heart  went  with  the  Pope's  demand. 
'  But  the  first  step  on  which  she  ventured  toward  a  compli- 
ance with  it  showed  the  difficulties  she  would  have  to  meet. , 
The  grant  of  the  first-fruits  to  Henry  the  Eighth  had  un- 
doubtedly rested  on  his  claim  of  supremacy  over  the 
Church ;  and  now  that  this  was  at  an  end  Mary  had  grounds 
for  proposing  their  restoration  to  church  purposes.  But 
the  proposal  was  looked  on  as  a  step  toward  the  resump- 
tion of  the  monastic  lands,  and  after  a  hot  and  prolonged 
debate  at  the  close  of  1555  the  Commons  only  assented  to 
it  by  a  small  majority.  It  was  plain  that  no  hearing 
would  be  given  to  the  Pope's  demand  for  a  restoration  of 
all  Church  property;  great  lords  were  heard  to  threaten 
that  they  would  keep  their  lands  so  long  as  they  had  a 
sword  by  their  side ;  and  England  was  thus  left  at  hopeless 
variance  with  the  Papacy. 

But  difficult  as  Mary's  task  became,  she  clung  as  tena- 
ciously as  ever  to  her  work  of  blood.  The  martyrdoms  went 
steadily  on,  and  at  the  opening  of  1556  the  sanction  of 
Rome  enabled  the  Queen  to  deal  with  a  victim  whose  death 
woke  all  England  to  the  reality  of  the  persecution.  Far  as 
he  stood  in  character  beneath  many  who  had  gone  before 
him  to  the  stake,  Cranmer  stood  high  above  all  in  his  ec- 
clesiastical position.  To  burn  the  Primate  of  the  English 
Church  for  heresy  was  to  shut  out  meaner  victims  from 
all  hope  of  escape.  And  on  the  position  of  Cranmer  none 
cast  a  doubt.  The  other  prelates  who  had  suffered  had 
been  placed  in  their  sees  after  the  separation  from  Rome, 
and  were  hardly  regarded  as  bishops  by  their  opponents. 
But,  whatever  had  been  his  part  in  the  schism,  Cranmer 
had  received  his  Pallium  from  the  Pope.  He  was,  in  the 
eyes  of  all,  Archbishop  of  Canterbury,  the  successor  of  St. 
Augustine  and  of  St.  Thomas  in  the  second  see  of  Western 
Christendom.  Revenge  however  and  religious  zeal  alike 
urged  the  Queen  to  bring  Cranmer  to  the  stake.  First 


268  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

among  the  many  decisions  in  which  the  Archbishop  had 
prostituted  justice  to  Henry's  will  stood  that  by  which  he 
had  annulled  the  King's  marriage  with  Catharine  and  de- 
clared Mary  a  bastard.  The  last  of  his  political  acts  had 
been  to  join,  whether  reluctantly  or  no,  in  the  shameless 
plot  to  exclude  Mary  from  the  throne.  His  great  position 
too  made  Cranmer  more  than  any  man  a  representative  of 
the  religious  revolution  which  had  passed  over  the  land. 
His  figure  stood  with  those  of  Henry  and  of  Cromwell  on 
the  frontispiece  of  the  English  Bible.  The  decisive  change 
which  had  been  given  to  the  character  of  the  Reformation 
under  Edward  was  due  wholly  to  Cranmer.  It  was  his 
voice  that  men  heard  and  still  hear  in  the  accents  of  the 
English  Liturgy. 

As  an  Archbishop,  Cranmer's  judgment  rested  with  no 
meaner  tribunal  than  that  of  Rome,  and  his  execution  had 
been  necessarily  delayed  till  its  sentence  could  be  given. 
It  was  not  till  the  opening  of  1556  that  the  Papal  see  con- 
victed him  of  heresy.  As  a  heretic  he  was  now  condemned 
to  suffer  at  the  stake.  But  the  courage  which  Cranmer 
had  shown  since  the  accession  of  Mary  gave  way  the  mo- 
ment his  final  doom  was  announced.  The  moral  cowardice 
which  had  displayed  itself  in  his  miserable  compliance 
with  the  lust  and  despotism  of  Henry  displayed  itself  again 
in  six  successive  recantations  by  which  he  hoped  to  pur- 
chase pardon.  But  pardon  was  impossible ;  and  Cranmer's 
strangely  mingled  nature  found  a  power  in  its  very  weak- 
ness when  he  was  brought  into  the  church  of  St.  Mary  at 
Oxford  on  the  twenty-first  of  March  to  repeat  his  recanta- 
tion on  the  way  to  the  stake.  "Now,"  ended  his  address 
to  the  hushed  congregation  before  him,  "  now  I  come  to 
the  great  thing  that  troubleth  my  conscience  more  than 
any  other  thing  that  ever  I  said  or  did  in  my  life,  and  that 
is  the  setting  abroad  of  writings  contrary  to  the  truth; 
which  here  I  now  renounce  and  refuse  as  things  written 
by  my  hand  contrary  to  the  truth  which  I  thought  in  my 
heart,  and  written  for  fear  of  death  to  save  my  life,  i£  it 


CHAP.  2.]  THE   REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  269 

might  be.  And,  forasmuch  as  my  hand  offended  in  writ- 
ing contrary  to  my  heart,  my  hand  therefore  shall  be  the 
first  punished;  for  if  I  come  to  the  fire,  it  shall  be  the  first 
burned."  "This  was  the  hand  that  wrote  it,"  he  again 
exclaimed  at  the  stake,  "therefore  it  shall  suffer  first  pun- 
ishment;" and  holding  it  steadily  in  the  flame  "he  never 
stirred  nor  cried"  till  life  was  gone. 

It  was  with  the  unerring  instinct  of  a  popular  movement 
that,  among  a  crowd  of  far  more  heroic  sufferers,  the 
Protestants  fixed,  in  spite  of  his  recantations,  on  the  mar- 
tyrdom of  Cranmer  as  the  death-blow  to  Catholicism  in 
England.  For  one  man  who  felt  within  him  the  joy  of 
Rowland  Taylor  at  the  prospect  of  the  stake,  there  were 
thousands  who  felt  the  shuddering  dread  of  Cranmer. 
The  triumphant  cry  of  Latimer  could  reach  only  hearts  as 
bold  as  his  own,  while  the  sad  pathos  of  the  Primate's 
humiliation  and  repentance  struck  chords  of  sympathy  and 
pity  in  the  hearts  of  all.  It  is  from  that  moment  that  we 
may  trace  the  bitter  remembrance  of  the  blood  shed  in  the 
cause  of  Rome;  which,  however  partial  and  unjust  it  must 
seem  to  an  historic  observer,  still  lies  graven  deep  in  the 
temper  of  the  English  people.  But  the  Queen  struggled 
desperately  on.  She  did  what  was  possible  to  satisfy  the 
unyielding  Pope.  In  the  face  of  the  Parliament's  signifi- 
cant reluctance  even  to  restore  the  first-fruits  to  the  Church, 
she  refounded  all  she  could  of  the  abbeys  which  had  been 
suppressed.  One  of  the  greatest  of  these,  the  Abbey  of 
Westminster,  was  re-established  before  the  close  of  1556, 
and  John  Feckenham  installed  as  its  abbot.  Such  a  step 
could  hardly  fail  to  wake  the  old  jealousy  of  any  attempt 
to  reclaim  the  Church-lands,  and  thus  to  alienate  the  nobles 
and  gentry  from  the  Queen.  They  were  soon  to  be  alien- 
ated yet  more  by  her  breach  of  the  solemn  covenant  on 
which  her  marriage  was  based.  Even  the  most  reckless 
of  her  counsellors  felt  the  unwisdom  of  aiding  Philip  in 
his  strife  with  France.  The  accession  of  England  to  the 
vast  dominion  which  the  Emperor  had  ceded  to  his  son  in 


870  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

1555  alllrat  realized  the  plans  of  Ferdinand  the  Catholic  for 
making  the  house  of  Austria  master  of  Western  Christen- 
dom. France  was  its  one  effective  foe;  and  the  overthrow 
of  France  in  the  war  which  was  going  on  between  the  two 
powers  would  leave  Philip  without  a  check.  How  keenly 
this  was  felt  at  the  English  council-board  was  seen  in  the 
resistance  which  was  made  to  Philip's  effort  to  drag  his 
new  realm  into  the  war.  Such  an  effort  was  in  itself  a 
crowning  breach  of  faith,  for  the  King's  marriage  had 
been  accompanied  by  a  solemn  pledge  that  England  should 
not  be  drawn  into  the  strifes  of  Spain.  But  Philip  knew 
little  of  good  faith  when  his  interest  was  at  stake.  The 
English  fleet  would  give  him  the  mastery  of  the  seas, 
English  soldiers  would  turn  the  scale  in  Flanders,  and  at 
the  opening  of  1557  the  King  again  crossed  the  Channel 
and  spent  three  months  in  pressing  his  cause  on  Mary  and 
her  advisers. 

"  He  did  more,"  says  a  Spanish  writer  of  the  time,  "  than 
any  one  would  have  believed  possible  with  that  proud  and 
indomitable  nation."  What  he  was  most  aided  by  was 
provocation  from  France.  A  body  of  refugees  who  had 
found  shelter  there  landed  in  Yorkshire  in  the  spring :  and 
their  leader,  Thomas  Stafford,  a  grandson  of  the  late  Duke 
of  Buckingham,  called  the  people  to  rise  against  the  tyranny 
of  foreigners  and  "the  satanic  designs  of  an  unlawful 
Queen."  The  French  King  hoped  that  a  rising  would 
give  the  Queen  work  at  home ;  but  the  revolt  was  easily 
crushed,  and  the  insult  enabled  Mary  to  override  her  coun- 
sellors' reluctance  and  to  declare  war  against  France.  The 
war  opened  with  triumphs  both  on  land  and  at  sea.  The 
junction  of  the  English  fleet  made  Philip  master  of  the 
Channel.  Eight  thousand  men,  "all  clad  in  their  green," 
were  sent  to  Flanders  under  Lord  Pembroke,  and  joined 
Philip's  forces  in  August  in  time  to  take  part  in  the  great 
victory  of  St.  Quentin.  In  October  the  little  army  re- 
turned home  in  triumph,  but  the  gleam  of  success  vanished 
suddenly  away.  In  the  autumn  of  1557  the  English  ships 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  271 

were  defeated  in  an  attack  on  the  Orkneys.  In  January 
1558  the  Duke  of  Guise  flung  himself  with  characteristic 
secrecy  and  energy  upon  Calais  and  compelled  it  to  sur- 
render before  succor  could  arrive.  "The  chief  jewel  of 
the  realm,"  as  Mary  herself  called  it,  was  suddenly  reft 
away ;  and  the  surrender  of  Guisnes,  which  soon  followed, 
left  England  without  a  foot  of  land  on  the  Continent. 

Bitterly  as  the  blow  was  felt,  the  Council,  though  pas- 
sionately pressed  by  the  Queen,  could  find  neither  money 
nor  men  for  any  attempt  to  recover  the  town.  The  war 
indeed  went  steadily  for  Spain  and  her  allies ;  and  Philip 
owed  his  victory  at  Gravelines  in  the  summer  of  1558 
mainly  to  the  opportune  arrival  of  ten  English  ships  of  war 
which  opened  fire  on  the  flank  of  the  French  army  that 
lay  open  to  the  sea.  But  England  could  not  be  brought  to 
take  further  part  in  the  contest.  The  levies  which  were 
being  raised  mutinied  and  dispersed.  The  forced  loan  to 
which  Mary  was  driven  to  resort  came  in  slowly.  The 
treasury  was  drained  not  only  by  the  opening  of  the  war 
with  France  but  by  the  opening  of  a  fresh  strife  in  Ireland. 
To  the  struggle  of  religion  which  had  begun  there  under 
the  Protectorate  the  accession  of  Mary  had  put  an  end. 
The  shadowy  form  of  the  earlier  Irish  Protestantism  melted 
quietly  away.  There  were  in  fact  no  Protestants  in  Ireland 
save  the  new  bishops ;  and  when  Bale  had  fled  over  sea 
from  his  diocese  of  Ossory  and  his  fellow-prelates  had  been 
deprived  the  Irish  Church  resumed  its  old  appearance.  No 
attempt  indeed  was  made  to  restore  the  monasteries ;  and 
Mary  exercised  her  supremacy,  deposed  or  appointed 
bishops,  and  repudiated  Papal  interference  with  her  ec- 
clesiastical acts  as  vigorously  as  her  father.  But  the  Mass 
was  restored,  the  old  modes  of  religious  worship  were 
again  held  in  honor,  and  religious  dissension  between  the 
Government  and  its  Irish  subjects  came  for  the  time  to  an 
end.  With  the  close  however  of  one  danger  came  the  rise 
of  another.  England  was  growing  tired  of  the  policy  of 
conciliation  which  had  been  steadily  pursued  by  Henry 


272  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

the  Eighth  and  his  successor.  As  yet  it  had  been'rewarded 
•with  precisely  the  sort  of  success  which  Wolsey  and  Crom- 
well anticipated.  The  chiefs  had  come  quietly  in  to  the 
plan,  and  their  septs  had  followed  them  in  submission  to 
the  new  order.  "  The  winning  of  the  Earl  of  Desmond 
was  the  winning  of  the  rest  of  Munster  with  small  charges. 
The  making  O'Brien  an  Earl  made  all  that  country  obedi- 
ent." The  Macwilliam  became  Lord  Clanrickard,  and  the 
Fitzpatricks  Barons  of  Upper  Ossory.  A  visit  of  the  great 
northern  chief  who  had  accepted  the  title  of  Earl  of  Tyrone 
to  the  English  Court  was  regarded  as  a  marked  step  in  the 
process  of  civilization. 

In  the  south,  where  the  system  of  English  law  was 
slowly  spreading,  the  chieftains  sat  on  the  bench  side  by 
side  with  the  English  justices  of  the  peace ;  and  something 
had  been  done  to  check  the  feuds  and  disorder  of  the  wild 
tribes  between  Limerick  and  Tipperary.  "  Men  may  pass 
quietly  throughout  these  countries  without  danger  of  rob- 
bery or  other  displeasure."  In  the  Clanrickard  county, 
once  wasted  with  war,  "ploughing  increaseth  daily."  In 
Tyrone  and  the  north  however  the  old  disorder  reigned 
without  a  check ;  and  everywhere  the  process  of  improve- 
ment tried  the  temper  of  the  English  Deputies  by  the  slow- 
ness of  its  advance.  The  only  hope  of  any  real  progress 
lay  in  patience ;  and  there  were  signs  that  the  Government 
at  Dublin  found  it  hard  to  wait.  The  "  rough  handling" 
of  the  chiefs  by  Sir  Edward  Bellingham,  a  Lord  Deputy 
under  the  Protector  Somerset,  roused  a  spirit  of  revolt  that 
only  subsided  when  the  poverty  of  the  Exchequer  forced 
him  to  withdraw  the  garrisons  he  had  planted  in  the  heart 
of  the  country.  His  successor  in  Mary's  reign,  Lord  Sus- 
sex, made  raid  after  raid  to  no  purpose  on  the  obstinate 
tribes  of  the  north,  burning  in  one  the  Cathedral  of  Armagh 
and  three  other  churches.  A  far  more  serious  breach  in 
the  system  of  conciliation  was  made  when  the  project  of 
English  colonization  which  Henry  had  steadily  rejected 
was  adopted  by  the  same  Lord  Deputy,  and  when  the 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  273 

country  of  the  O'Connors  was  assigned  to  English  settlers 
and  made  shire-land  under  the  names  of  King's  and 
Queen's  Counties  in  honor  of  Philip  and  Mary.  A  savage 
warfare  began  at  once  between  the  planters  and  the  dis- 
possessed septs,  a  warfare  which  only  ended  in  the  follow- 
ing reign  in  the  extermination  of  the  Irishmen,  and  com- 
missioners were  appointed  to  survey  waste  lands  with  the 
aim  of  carrying  the  work  of  colonization  into  other  dis- 
tricts.  The  pressure  of  the  war  against  France  put  an  end 
to  these  wider  projects,  but  the  strife  in  Meath  went  sav- 
agely on  and  proved  a  sore  drain  to  the  Exchequer. 

Nor  was  Mary  without  difficulties  in  the  North.  Re- 
ligiously as  well  as  politically  her  reign  told  in  a  marked 
way  on  the  fortunes  of  Scotland.  If  the  Queen's  policy 
failed  to  crush  Protestantism  in  England,  it  gave  a  new 
impulse  to  it  in  the  northern  realm.  In  Scotland  the  wealth 
and  worldliness  of  the  great  churchmen  had  long  ago  spread 
a  taste  for  heresy  among  the  people ;  and  Lollardry  sur- 
vived as  a  power  north  of  the  border  long  after  it  had  al- 
most died  out  to  the  south  of  it.  The  impulse  of  the  Luth- 
eran movement  was  seen  in  the  diffusion  of  the  new  opin- 
ions by  a  few  scholars,  such  as  Wishart  and  Hamilton ; 
but  though  Henry  the  Eighth  pressed  his  nephew  James 
the  Fifth  to  follow  him  in  the  work  he  was  doing  in  Eng- 
land, it  was  plain  that  the  Scotch  reformers  could  look  for 
little  favor  from  the  Crown.  The  policy  of  the  Scottish 
kings  regarded  the  Church  as  their  ally  against  the  turbu- 
lent nobles,  and  James  steadily  held  its  enemies  at  bay. 
The  Regent,  Mary  of  Guise,  clung  to  the  same  policy. 
But  stoutly  as  the  whole  nation  withstood  the  English 
efforts  to  acquire  a  political  supremacy,  the  religious  revo- 
lution in  England  told  more  and  more  on  the  Scotch  nobles. 
No  nobility  was  so  poor  as  that  of  Scotland,  and  nowhere 
in  Europe  was  the  contrast  between  their  poverty  and  the 
riches  of  the  Church  so  great.  Each  step  of  the  vast 
spoliation  that  went  on  south  of  the  border,  the  confisca- 
tion of  the  lesser  abbeys,  the  suppression  of  the  greater, 


274  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

the  secularization  of  chantries  and  hospitals,  woke  a  fresh 
greed  in  the  baronage  of  the  north.  The  new  opinions 
soon  found  disciples  among  them.  It  was  a  gronp  of 
Protestant  nobles  who  surprised  the  Castle  of  St.  Andrews 
and  murdered  Cardinal  Beaton.  The  "  Gospellers"  from  the 
Lowlands  already  formed  a  marked  body  in  the  army  that 
fought  at  Pinkie  Cleugh.  As  yet  however  the  growth  of 
the  new  opinions  had  been  slow,  and  there  had  been  till  now 
little  public  show  of  resistance  to  the  religion  of  the  State. 
With  the  accession  of  Mary  however  all  was  changed. 
Under  Henry  and  Edward  the  Catholicism  of  Scotland  had 
profited  by  the  national  opposition  to  a  Protestant  England ; 
but  now  that  Catholicism  was  again  triumphant  in  Eng- 
land Protestantism  became  far  less  odious  to  the  Scotch 
statesmen.  A  still  greater  change  was  wrought  by  the 
marriage  with  Philip.  Such  a  match,  securing  as  it  did 
to  England  the  aid  of  Spain  in  any  future  aggression  upon 
Scotland,  became  a  danger  to  the  northern  realm  which  not 
only  drew  her  closer  to  France  but  forced  her  to  give  shelter 
and  support  to  the  sectaries  who  promised  to  prove  a  check 
upon  Mary.  Many  of  the  exiles  therefore  who  left  England 
for  the  sake  of  religion  found  a  refuge  in  Scotland.  Among 
these  was  John  Knox.  Knox  had  been  one  of  the  fol- 
lowers of  Wishart;  he  had  acted  as  pastor  to  the  Protest- 
ants who  after  Beaton's  murder  held  the  Castle  of  St.  An- 
drews, and  had  been  captured  with  them  by  a  French  force 
in  the  summer  of  1547.  The  Frenchmen  sent  the  heretics 
to  the  galleys ;  and  it  was  as  a  galley  slave  in  one  of  their 
vessels  that  Knox  next  saw  his  native  shores.  As  the 
vessel  lay  tossing  in  the  bay  of  St.  Andrews,  a  comrade 
bade  him  look  to  the  land,  and  asked  him  if  he  knew  it. 
"  I  know  it  well,"  was  the  answer;  " for  I  see  the  steeple  of 
that  place  where  God  first  in  public  opened  my  mouth  to 
His  glory;  and  I  am  fully  persuaded,  how  weak  that  ever 
I  now  appear,  I  shall  not  depart  this  life  till  mv  tongue 
glorify  His  holy  name  in  the  same  place !"  It  was  long 
however  before  he  could  return.  Released  at  the  opening 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  275 

of  1549,  Knox  found  shelter  in  England,  where  he  became 
one  of  the  most  stirring  among  the  preachers  of  the  day, 
and  was  offered  a  bishopric  by  Northumberland.  Mary's 
accession  drove  him  again  to  France.  But  the  new  policy 
of  the  Regent  now  opened  Scotland  to  the  English  refugees, 
and  it  was  as  one  of  these  that  Knox  returned  in  1555  to 
his  own  country.  Although  he  soon  withdrew  to  take 
charge  of  the  English  congregation  at  Frankfort  and 
Geneva  his  energy  had  already  given  a  decisive  impulse  to 
the  new  movement.  In  a  gathering  at  the  house  of  Lord 
Erskine  he  persuaded  the  assembly  to  "  refuse  all  society 
with  idolatry,  and  bind  themselves  to  the  uttermost  of  their 
power  to  maintain  the  true  preaching  of  the  Evangile,  as 
God  should  offer  to  their  preachers  an  opportunity."  The 
confederacy  woke  anew  the  jealousy  of  the  government, 
and  persecution  revived.  But  some  of  the  greatest  nobles 
now  joined  the  reforming  cause.  The  Earl  of  Morton,  the 
head  of  the  house  of  Douglas,  the  Earl  of  Argyle,  the 
greatest  chieftain  of  the  west,  and  above  all  a  bastard  son 
of  the  late  King,  Lord  James  Stuart,  who  bore  as  yet  the 
title  of  prior  of  St.  Andrews,  but  who  was  to  be  better 
known  afterwards  as  the  Earl  of  Murray,  placed  them- 
selves at  the  head  of  the  movement.  The  remonstrances 
of  Knox  from  his  exile  at  Geneva  stirred  them  to  interfere 
in  behalf  of  the  persecuted  Protestants ;  and  at  the  close  of 
1557  these  nobles  united  with  the  rest  of  the  Protestant 
leaders  in  an  engagement  which  became  memorable  as  the 
first  among  those  Covenants  which  were  to  give  shape  and 
color  to  Scotch  religion. 

"  We,"  ran  this  solemn  bond,  "perceiving  how  Satan  in 
his  members,  the  Antichrists  of  our  time,  cruelly  doth 
rage,  seeking  to  overthrow  and  to  destroy  the  Evangel  of 
Christ,  and  His  Congregation,  ought  according  to  out 
bounden  duty  to  strive  in  our  Master's  cause  even  unto  the 
death,  being  certain  of  our  victory  in  Him.  The  which 
our  duty  being  well  considered,  we  do  promise  before  the 
Majesty  of  God  and  His  Congregation  that  we,  by  His 


276  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VL 

grace,  shall  with  all  diligence  continually  apply  our  whole 
power,  substance,  and  our  very  lives  to  maintain,  set  for- 
ward, and  establish  the  most  blessed  Word  of  God  and  His 
Congregation,  and  shall  labor  at  our  possibility  to  have 
faithful  ministers,  purely  and  truly  to  minister  Christ's 
Evangel  and  sacraments  to  His  people.  We  shall  main- 
tain them,  nourish  them,  and  defend  them,  the  whole  Con- 
gregation of  Christ  and  every  member  thereof,  at  our  whole 
power  and  wearing  of  our  lives,  against  Satan  and  all 
wicked  power  that  does  intend  tyranny  or  trouble  against 
the  foresaid  Congregation.  Unto  the  which  Holy  Word 
and  Congregation  we  do  join  us,  and  also  do  forsake  and 
renounce  the  congregation  of  Satan  with  all  the  supersti- 
tious abomination  and  idolatry  thereof :  and  moreover  shall 
declare  ourselves  manifestly  enemies  thereto  by  this  our 
faithful  promise  before  God,  testified  to  His  Congregation 
by  our  subscription  at  these  presents." 

The  Covenant  of  the  Scotch  nobles  marked  a  new  epoch 
in  the  strife  of  religions.  Till  now  the  reformers  had  op- 
posed the  doctrine  of  nationality  to  the  doctrine  of  Cathol- 
icism. In  the  teeth  of  the  pretensions  which  the  Church 
advanced  to  a  uniformity  of  religion  in  every  land,  what- 
ever might  be  its  differences  of  race  or  government,  the 
first  Protestants  had  advanced  the  principle  that  each  prince 
or  people  had  alone  the  right  to  determine  its  form  of  faith 
and  worship.  "Cujus  regio"  ran  the  famous  phrase 
which  embodied  their  theory,  "ejus  religio."  It  was  the 
acknowledgment  of  this  principle  that  the  Lutheran 
princes  obtained  at  the  Diet  of  Spires ;  it  was  on  this  prin- 
ciple that  Henry  based  his  Act  of  Supremacy.  Its  strength 
lay  in  the  correspondence  of  such  a  doctrine  with  the 
political  circumstances  of  the  time.  It  was  the  growing 
feeling  of  nationality  which  combined  with  the  growing 
development  of  monarchical  power  to  establish  the  theory 
that  the  political  and  religious  life  of  each  nation  should 
be  one  and  that  the  religion  of  the  people  should  follow  the 
faith  of  the  prince.  Had  Protestantism,  as  seemed  at  one 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  277 

time  possible,  secured  the  adhesion  of  all  the  European 
princes,  such  a  theory  might  well  have  led  everywhere  as 
it  led  in  England  to  the  establishment  of  the  worst  of 
tyrannies,  a  tyranny  that  claims  to  lord  alike  over  both 
body  and  soul.  The  world  was  saved  from  this  danger  by 
the  tenacity  with  which  the  old  religion  still  held  its  power. 
In  half  the  countries  of  Europe  the  disciples  of  the  new 
opinions  had  soon  to  choose  between  submission  to  their 
conscience  and  submission  to  their  prince;  and  a  move- 
ment which  began  in  contending  for  the  religious  suprem- 
acy of  Kings  ended  in  those  wars  of  religion  which  ar- 
rayed nation  after  nation  against  their  sovereigns.  In 
this  religious  revolution  Scotland  led  the  way.  Her  Prot- 
estantism was  the  first  to  draw  the  sword  against  earthly 
rulers.  The  solemn  "  Covenant"  which  bound  together  her 
"  Congregation"  in  the  face  of  the  regency,  which  pledged 
its  members  to  withdraw  from  all  submission  to  the  re' 
ligion  of  the  State  and  to  maintain  in  the  face  of  the  State 
their  liberty  of  conscience,  opened  that  vast  series  of 
struggles  which  ended  in  Germany  with  the  Peace  of 
Westphalia  and  in  England  with  the  Toleration  Act  of 
William  the  Third. 

The  "  Covenant"  of  the  lords  sounded  a  bold  defiance  to 
the  Catholic  reaction  across  the  border.  While  Mary  re- 
placed the  Prayer-book  by  the  Mass,  the  Scotch  lords  re- 
solved that  whenever  their  power  extended  the  Common 
Prayer  should  be  read  in  all  churches.  While  hundreds 
were  going  to  the  stake  in  England  the  Scotch  nobles 
boldly  met  the  burning  of  their  preachers  by  a  threat  of 
war.  "They  trouble  our  preachers,"  ran  their  bold  re- 
monstrance against  the  bishops  in  the  Queen-mother's 
presence;  "they  would  murder  them  and  us!  shall  we 
suffer  this  any  longer?  No,  madam,  it  shall  not  be !"  and 
therewith  every  man  put  on  his  steel  bonnet.  The  Regent 
was  helpless  for  the  moment  and  could  find  refuge  only  in 
fair  words,  words  so  fair  that  for  a  while  the  sternest  of 
the  reformers  believed  her  to  be  drifting  to  their  faith. 


278  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

She  was  in  truth  fettered  by  the  need  of  avoiding  civil 
strife  at  a  time  when  the  war  of  England  against  France 
made  a  Scotch  war  against  England  inevitable.  The 
nobles  refused  indeed  to  cross  the  border,  but  the  threat  of 
a  Scotch  invasion  was  one  of  the  dangers  against  which 
Mary  Tudor  now  found  herself  forced  to  provide.  Nor 
was  the  uprise  of  Protestantism  in  Scotland  the  only  result 
of  her  policy  in  giving  fire  and  strength  to  the  new  re- 
ligion. Each  step  in  the  persecution  had  been  marked 
by  a  fresh  flight  of  preachers,  merchants,  and  gentry  across 
the  seas.  "Some  fled  into  France,  some  into  Flanders, 
and  some  into  the  high  countries  of  the  Empire."  As 
early  as  1554  we  find  groups  of  such  refugees  at  Frankfort, 
Emden,  Zurich,  and  Strassburg.  Calvin  welcomed  some  of 
them  at  Geneva;  the  "lords  of  Berne"  suffered  a  group  to 
settle  at  Aarau;  a  hundred  gathered  round  the  Duchess  of 
Suffolk  at  Wesel.  Among  the  exiles  we  find  many  who 
were  to  be  bishops  and  statesmen  in  the  coming  reign. 
Sir  Francis  Knollys  was  at  Frankfort,  Sir  Francis  Wal- 
singham  travelled  in  France ;  among  the  divines  were  the 
later  archbishops  Grindal  and  Sandys,  and  the  later  bishops 
Home,  Parkhurst,  Aylmer,  Jewel,  and  Cox.  Mingled 
with  these  were  men  who  had  already  played  their  part 
in  Edward's  reign,  such  as  Poinet,  the  deprived  Bishop  of 
Winchester,  Bale,  the  deprived  Bishop  of  Ossory,  and  the 
preachers  Lever  and  Knox. 

Gardiner  had  threatened  that  the  fugitives  should  gnaw 
their  fingers  from  hunger,  but  ample  supplies  reached  them 
from  London  merchants  and  other  partisans  in  England, 
and  they  seem  to  have  lived  in  fair  comfort  while  their 
brethren  at  home  were  "going  to  the  fire."  Their  chief 
troubles  sprang  from  strife  among  themselves.  The  hotter 
spirits  among  the  English  Protestants  had  seen  with  dis- 
content the  retention  of  much  that  they  looked  on  as  super- 
stitious and  Popish  in  even  the  last  liturgy  of  Edward's 
reign.  That  ministers  should  still  wear  white  surplices, 
that  litanies  should  be  sung,  that  the  congregation  should 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  279 

respond  to  the  priest,  that  babes  should  be  signed  in  baptism 
with  the  sign  of  the  cross,  that  rings  should  be  given  in 
marriage,  filled  them  with  horror.  Hooper,  the  leader  of 
this  party,  refused  when  made  bishop  to  don  his  rochet ;  and 
had  only  been  driven  by  imprisonment  to  vest  himself  in 
"the  rags  of  Popery."  Trivial  indeed  as  such  questions 
seemed  in  themselves,  an  issue  lay  behind  them  which  was 
enough  to  make  men  face  worse  evils  than  a  prison.  The 
royal  supremacy,  the  headship  of  the  Church,  which  Henry 
the  Eighth  claimed  for  himself  and  his  successors,  was,  as 
we  have  seen,  simply  an  application  of  the  principle  which 
the  states  of  North  Germany  had  found  so  effective  in 
meeting  the  pretensions  of  the  Emperor  or  the  Pope.  The 
same  sentiment  of  national  life  took  a  new  form  in  the 
preservation  of  whatever  the  change  of  religious  thought 
left  it  possible  to  preserve  in  the  national  tradition  of  faith 
and  worship.  In  the  Lutheran  churches,  though  the  Mass 
was  gone,  reredos  and  crucifix  remained  untouched.  In 
England  the  whole  ecclesiastical  machinery  was  jealously 
preserved.  Its  Church  was  still  governed  by  bishops  who 
traced  their  succession  to  the  Apostles.  The  words  of  its 
new  Prayer-book  adhered  as  closely  as  they  might  to  the 
words  of  Missal  and  Breviary.  What  made  such  an  ar- 
rangement possible  was  the  weakness  of  the  purely  relig- 
ious impulse  in  the  earlier  stages  of  the  Reformation.  In 
Germany  indeed  or  in  England,  the  pressure  for  theological 
change  was  small ;  the  religious  impulse  told  on  but  a  small 
part,  and  that  not  an  influential  part  of  the  population ;  it 
did  in  fact  little  more  than  quicken  and  bring  into  action 
the  older  and  widely-felt  passion  for  ecclesiastical  inde- 
pendence. 

But  the  establishment  of  this  independence  at  once  gave 
fresh  force  to  the  religious  movement.  From  denouncing 
the  Pope  as  a  usurper  of  national  rights  men  passed  easily 
to  denounce  the  Papal  system  as  in  itself  anti -Christian. 
In  setting  aside  the  voice  of  the  Papacy  as  a  ground  of 
faith  the  new  churches  had  been  forced  to  find  a  ground  of 


380  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

faith  in  the  Bible.  But  the  reading  and  discussion  of  the 
Bible  opened  up  a  thousand  questions  of  belief  and  ritual, 
and  the  hatred  of  Rome  drew  men  more  and  more  to  find 
answers  to  such  questions  which  were  antagonistic  to  the 
creed  and  usages  of  a  past  that  was  identified  in  their  eyes 
with  the  Papacy.  Such  questions  could  hardly  fail  to  find 
an  echo  in  the  people  at  large.  To  the  bulk  of  men  ec- 
clesiastical institutions  are  things  dim  and  remote;  and 
the  establishment  of  ecclesiastical  independence,  though  it 
gratified  the  national  pride,  could  have  raised  little  personal 
enthusiasm.  But  the  direct  and  personal  interest  of  every 
man  seemed  to  lie  in  the  right  holding  of  religious  truth, 
and  thus  the  theological  aspect  of  the  Reformation  tended 
more  and  more  to  supersede  its  political  one.  All  that  is 
generous  and  chivalrous  in  human  feeling  told  in  the  same 
direction.  To  statesmen  like  Gardiner  or  Paget  the  ac- 
ceptance of  one  form  of  faith  or  worship  after  another  as 
one  sovereign  after  another  occupied  the  throne  seemed,  no 
doubt,  a  logical  and  inevitable  result  of  their  acceptance 
of  the  royal  supremacy.  But  to  the  people  at  large  there 
must  have  been  something  false  and  ignoble  in  the  sight 
of  a  statesman  or  a  priest  who  had  cast  off  the  Mass  undei 
Edward  to  embrace  it  again  under  Mary,  and  who  was 
ready  again  to  cast  it  off  at  the  will  of  Mary's  successor. 
If  worship  and  belief  were  indeed  spiritual  things,  if  they 
had  any  semblance  of  connection  with  divine  realities,  men 
must  have  felt  that  it  was  impossible  to  put  them  on  and 
off  at  a  king's  caprice.  It  was  this,  even  more  than  the 
natural  pity  which  they  raised,  that  gave  their  weight  to 
the  Protestant  martyrdoms  under  Mary.  They  stood  out 
in  emphatic  protest  against  the  doctrine  of  local  religion, 
of  a  belief  dictated  by  the  will  of  kings.  From  the  Primate 
of  the  Church  to  the  "blind  girl"  who  perished  at  Col- 
chester, three  hundred  were  found  in  England  who  chose 
rather  to  go  to  the  fire  than  to  take  up  again  at  the  Queen's 
will  what  their  individual  conscience  had  renounced  as  a 
lie  against  God. 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  281 

But  from  the  actual  assertion  of  such  a  right  of  the  in- 
dividual conscience  to  find  and  hold  what  was  true,  even 
those  who  witnessed  for  it  by  their  death  would  have 
shrunk.  Driven  by  sheer  force  of  fact  from  the  theory  of 
a  national  and  royal  faith,  men  still  shuddered  to  stand 
alone.  The  old  doctrine  of  a  Catholic  Christianity  flung 
over  them  its  spell.  Rome  indeed  they  looked  on  as  anti- 
Christ,  but  the  doctrine  which  Rome  had  held  so  long  and 
so  firmly,  the  doctrine  that  truth  should  be  coextensive 
with  the  world  and  not  limited  by  national  boundaries, 
that  the  Church  was  one  in  all  countries  and  among  all 
peoples,  that  there  was  a  Christendom  which  embraced  all 
kingdoms  and  a  Christian  law  that  ruled  peoples  and  kings, 
became  more  and  more  the  doctrine  of  Rome's  bitterest 
opponents.  It  was  this  doctrine  which  found  its  embodi- 
ment in  John  Calvin,  a  young  French  scholar,  driven  in 
early  manhood  from  his  own  country  by  the  persecution 
of  Francis  the  First.  Calvin  established  himself  at  Basle, 
and  produced  there  in  1535  at  the  age  of  twenty-six  a  book 
which  was  to  form  the  theology  of  the  Huguenot  churches, 
his  "Institutes  of  the  Christian  Religion."  What  was 
really  original  in  this  work  was  Calvin's  doctrine  of  the 
organization  of  the  Church  and  of  its  relation  to  the  State. 
The  base  of  the  Christian  republic  was  with  him  the 
Christian  man,  elected  and  called  of  God,  preserved  by 
his  grace  from  the  power  of  sin,  predestinate  to  eternal  life. 
Every  such  Christian  man  is  in  himself  a  priest,  and  every 
group  of  such  men  is  a  Church,  self-governing,  independ- 
ent of  all  save  God,  supreme  in  its  authority  over  all  mat- 
ters ecclesiastical  and  spiritual.  The  constitution  of  such 
a  church,  where  each  member  as  a  Christian  was  equal 
before  God,  necessarily  took  a  democratic  form.  In  Cal- 
vin's theory  of  Church  government  it  is  the  Church  which 
itself  elects  its  lay  elders  and  lay  deacons  for  purposes  of 
administration;  it  is  with  the  approval  and  consent  of  the 
Church  that  elders  and  deacons  with  the  existing  body  of 
pastors  elect  new  ministers.  It  is  through  these  officers 


282  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI 

that  the  Church  exercises  its  power  of  the  keys,  the  power 
of  diffusing  the  truth  and  the  power  of  correcting  error. 
To  the  minister  belongs  the  preaching  of  the  word  and  the 
direction  of  all  religious  instruction ;  to  the  body  of  min- 
isters belongs  the  interpretation  of  scripture  and  the  de- 
cision of  doctrine.  On  the  other  hand  the  administration 
of  discipline,  the  supervision  of  the  moral  conduct  of  each 
professing  Christian,  the  admonition  of  the  erring,  the  ex- 
communication and  exclusion  from  the  body  of  the  Church 
of  the  unbelieving  and  the  utterly  unworthy,  belongs  to  the 
Consistory,  the  joint  assembly  of  ministers  and  elders.  To 
this  discipline  princes  as  well  as  common  men  are  alike 
subject;  princes  as  well  as  common  men  must  take  their 
doctrine  from  the  ministers  of  the  Church. 

The  claims  of  the  older  faith  to  spiritual  and  ecclesiastical 
supremacy  over  the  powers  of  earth  reappeared  in  this 
theory.  Calvin  like  the  Papacy  ignored  all  national  inde- 
pendence, all  pretensions  of  peoples  as  such  to  create  their 
own  system  of  church  doctrine  or  church  government. 
Doctrine  and  government  he  held  to  be  already  laid  down 
in  the  words  of  the  Bible,  and  all  questions  that  rose  out  of 
those  words  came  under  the  decision  of  the  ecclesiastical 
body  of  ministers.  Wherever  a  reformed  religion  ap- 
peared, there  was  provided  for  it  a  simple  but  orderly  or- 
ganization which  in  its  range  and  effectiveness  rivalled 
that  of  the  older  Catholicism.  On  the  other  hand  this  or- 
ganization rested  on  a  wholly  new  basis;  spiritual  and 
ecclesiastical  power  came  from  below,  not  from  above ;  the 
true  sovereign  in  this  Christian  state  was  not  Pope  or 
Bishop  but  the  Christian  man.  Despotic  as  the  authority 
of  pastor  and  elders  seemed,  pastor  and  elders  were  alike 
the  creation  of  the  whole  congregation,  and  their  judg- 
ment could  in  the  last  resort  be  adopted  or  set  aside  by  it. 
Such  a  system  stood  out  in  bold  defiance  against  the  ten- 
dencies of  the  day.  On  its  religious  side  it  came  into  con- 
flict with  that  principle  of  nationality,  of  ecclesiastical  as 
well  as  civil  subjection  to  the  prince,  on  which  the  re- 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  283 

formed  Churches  and  above  all  the  Church  of  England  had 
till  now  been  built  up.  As  a  vast  and  consecrated  democ- 
racy it  stood  in  contrast  with  the  whole  social  and  political 
framework  of  the  European  nations.  Grave  as  we  may 
count  the  faults  of  Calvinism,  alien  as  its  temper  may  in 
many  ways  be  from  the  temper  of  the  modern  world,  it  is 
in  Calvinism  that  the  modern  world  strikes  its  roots,  for 
it  was  Calvinism  that  first  revealed  the  worth  and  dignity 
of  Man.  Called  of  God,  and  heir  of  heaven,  the  trader  at 
his  counter  and  the  digger  in  his  field  suddenly  rose  into 
equality  with  the  noble  and  the  king. 

It  was  this  system  that  Calvin  by  a  singular  fortune  was 
able  to  put  into  actual  working  in  the  little  city  of  Geneva, 
where  the  party  of  the  Reformation  had  become  master  and 
called  him  in  1536  to  be  their  spiritual  head.  Driven  out 
but  again  recalled,  his  influence  made  Geneva  from  1541 
the  centre  of  the  Protestant  world.  The  refugees  who 
crowded  to  the  little  town  from  persecution  in  France,  in 
the  Netherlands,  in  England,  found  there  an  exact  and 
formal  doctrine,  a  rigid  discipline  of  manners  and  faith,  a 
system  of  church  government,  a  form  of  church  worship, 
stripped,  as  they  held,  of  the  last  remnant  of  the  supersti- 
tions of  the  past.  Calvin  himself  with  his  austere  and 
frugal  life,  his  enormous  industry,  his  power  of  govern- 
ment, his  quick  decision,  his  undoubting  self-confidence, 
his  unswerving  will,  remained  for  three  and  twenty  years 
till  his  death  in  1564  supreme  over  Protestant  opinion.  His 
influence  told  heavily  on  England.  From  the  hour  of 
Cromwell's  fall  the  sympathies  of  the  English  reformers 
had  drawn  them  not  to  the  Lutheran  Churches  of  North 
Germany  but  to  the  more  progressive  Churches  of  the 
Rhineland  and  the  Netherlands;  and,  on  the  critical  ques- 
tion of  the  Lord's  Supper  which  mainly  divided  the  two 
great  branches  of  the  Reformation,  Cranmer  and  his  parti- 
sans became  more  definitely  anti-sacramentarian  as  the 
years  went  by.  At  Edward's  death  the  exiles  showed  their 
tendencies  by  seeking  refuge  not  with  the  Lutheran 


284  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

Churches  of  North  Germany  but  with  the  Calvinistic 
Churches  of  Switzerland  or  the  Rhine ;  and  contact  with 
such  leaders  as  Bullinger  at  Zurich  or  Calvin  at  Geneva 
could  hardly  fail  to  give  fresh  vigor  to  the  party  which 
longed  for  a  closer  union  with  the  foreign  churches  and 
a  more  open  breach  with  the  past. 

The  results  of  this  contact  first  showed  themselves  at 
Frankfort.  At  the  instigation  of  Wittingham,  who  in 
Elizabeth's  days  became  Dean  of  Durham,  a  body  of  Eng- 
lish exiles  that  had  found  shelter  there  resolved  to  reform 
both  worship  and  discipline.  The  obnoxious  usages  were 
expunged  from  the  Prayer-book,  omissions  were  made  in 
the  communion  service,  a  minister  and  deacons  chosen, 
and  rules  drawn  up  for  church  government  after  the  Gene- 
van model.  Free  at  last  "  from  all  dregs  of  superstitious 
ceremonies"  the  Frankfort  refugees  thanked  God  "that 
had  given  them  such  a  church  in  a  strange  land  wherein 
they  might  hear  God's  holy  word  preached,  the  sacraments 
rightly  ministered,  and  discipline  used,  which  in  their  own 
country  could  never  be  obtained."  But  their  invitation  to 
the  other  English  exiles  to  join  them  in  the  enjoyment  of 
these  blessings  met  with  a  steady  repulse.  Lever  and 
the  exiles  at  Zurich  refused  to  come  unless  they  might  "  al- 
together serve  and  praise  God  as  freely  and  uprightly  as 
the  order  last  taken  in  the  Church  of  England  permitteth 
and  presenteth,  for  we  are  fully  determined  to  admit  and 
use  no  other."  The  main  body  of  the  exiles  who  were 
then  gathered  at  Strassburg  echoed  the  refusal.  Knox, 
however,  who  had  been  chosen  minister  by  the  Frankfort 
congregation,  moved  rapidly  forward,  rejecting  the  com- 
munion service  altogether  as  superstitious,  and  drawing  up 
a  new  "  order"  of  worship  after  the  Genevan  model.  But 
in  the  spring  of  1555  these  efforts  were  foiled  by  the  arrival 
of  fresh  exiles  from  England  of  a  more  conservative  turn : 
the  reformers  were  outvoted ;  Knox  was  driven  from  the 
town  by  the  magistrates  "  in  fear  of  the  Emperor"  whom  he 
had  outraged  in  an  "  Admonition"  to  the  English  people, 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  285 

which  he  had  lately  issued ;  and  the  English  service  was 
restored.  Wittingham  and  his  adherents,  still  resolute, 
as  Bale  wrote,  "  to  erect  a  Church  of  the  Purity"  (we  may 
perhaps  trace  in  the  sneer  the  origin  of  their  later  name  of 
Puritans),  found  a  fresh  refuge  at  Basle  and  Geneva,  where 
the  leaders  of  the  party  occupied  themselves  in  a  metrical 
translation  of  the  Psalms  which  left  its  traces  on  English 
psalmody  and  in  the  production  of  what  was  afterward 
known  as  the  Geneva  Bible. 

Petty  as  this  strife  at  Frankfort  may  seem,  it  marks  the 
first  open  appearance  of  English  Puritanism,  and  the  open- 
ing of  a  struggle  which  widened  through  the  reign  of 
Elizabeth  till  under  the  Stuarts  it  broke  England  in  pieces. 
But  busy  as  they  were  in  strife  among  themselves,  the 
exiles  were  still  more  busy  in  fanning  the  discontent  at 
home.  Books,  pamphlets,  broadsides,  were  written  and 
sent  for  distribution  to  England.  The  violence  of  their 
language  was  incredible.  No  sooner  had  Bonner  issued 
his  injunctions  than  Bale  denounced  him  in  a  fierce  reply 
as  "a  beastly  belly-god  and  damnable  dunghill."  With  a 
spirit  worthy  of  the  "  bloody  bitesheeps"  whom  he  attacked, 
the  ex-Bishop  of  Ossory  regretted  that  when  Henry  plucked 
down  Becket's  shrine  he  had  not  burned  the  idolatrous 
priests  upon  it.  It  probably  mattered  little  to  Bale  that  at 
the  moment  when  he  wrote  not  a  single  Protestant  had  as 
yet  been  sent  to  the  stake ;  but  language  such  as  this  was 
hardly  likely  to  stir  Mary  to  a  spirit  of  moderation.  The 
Spanish  marriage  gave  the  refugees  a  fairer  opportunity 
of  attack,  and  the  Government  was  forced  to  make  inquiries 
of  the  wardens  of  city  guilds  "  whether  they  had  seen  or 
heard  of  any  of  these  books  which  had  come  from  beyond 
seas."  The  violence  of  the  exiles  was  doubled  by  the  sup- 
pression of  Wyatt's  revolt.  Poinet,  the  late  Bishop  of 
Winchester,  who  had  taken  part  in  it,  fled  over  sea  to  write 
a  "  Sharp  Tractate  of  political  power"  in  which  he  discussed 
the  question  "  whether  it  be  lawful  to  depose  an  evil  gov- 
ernor and  kill  a  tyrant." 


286  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

But  with  the  actual  outbreak  of  persecution  and  the  death 
of  Cranmer  all  restraint  was  thrown  aside.  In  his  "  First 
Blast  of  the  Trumpet  against  the  Monstrous  Regiment  of 
Women"  Knox  denounced  Mary  as  a  Jezebel,  a  traitress, 
and  a  bastard.  He  declared  the  rule  of  women  to  be 
against  the  law  of  Nature  and  of  God.  The  duty,  whether 
of  the  estates  or  people  of  the  realm,  was  "  first  to  remove 
from  honor  and  authority  that  monster  in  nature ;  second- 
arily, if  any  presume  to  defend  that  impiety,  they  ought 
not  to  fear  first  to  pronounce,  then  after  to  execute  against 
them  the  sentence  of  death."  To  keep  the  oath  of  alle- 
giance was  "nothing  but  plain  rebellion  against  God." 
"The  day  of  vengeance,"  burst  out  the  writer,  "which 
shall  apprehend  that  horrible  monster,  Jezebel  of  England, 
and  such  as  maintain  her  monstrous  cruelty  is  already  ap- 
pointed in  the  counsel  of  the  Eternal ;  and  I  verily  believe 
that  it  is  so  nigh  that  she  shall  not  reign  so  long  in  tyranny 
as  hitherto  she  hath  done,  when  God  shall  declare  himself 
her  enemy."  Another  exile,  Goodman,  inquired  "how 
superior  powers  ought  to  be  obeyed  of  their  subjects ;  and 
wherein  they  may  lawfully  by  God's  word  be  disobeyed 
and  resisted. "  His  book  was  a  direct  summons  to  rebellion. 
"By  giving  authority  to  an  idolatrous  woman,"  Goodman 
wrote  to  his  English  fellow-subjects,  "  ye  have  banished 
Christ  and  his  Gospel.  Then  in  taking  the  same  authority 
from  her  you  shall  restore  Christ  and  his  word,  and  shall  do 
well.  In  obeying  her  you  have  disobeyed  God ;  then  in 
disobeying  her  you  shall  please  God."  "  Though  it  should 
appear  at  the  first  sight,"  he  urged,  "a  great  disorder  that 
the  people  should  take  unto  them  the  punishment  of  trans- 
gressions, yet  when  the  magistrates  and  other  officers  cease 
to  do  their  duties  they  are  as  it  were  without  officers,  yea, 
worse  than  if  they  had  none  at  all,  and  then  God  giveth 
the  sword  into  the  people's  hand."  And  what  the  people 
were  to  do  with  the  sword  Poinet  had  already  put  very 
clearly.  It  was  the  "ungodly  serpent  Mary"  who  was 
"  the  chief  instrument  of  all  this  present  misery  in  Eng- 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  287 

land."  "Now  both  by  God's  laws  and  man's,"  concluded 
the  bishop,  "  she  ought  to  be  punished  with  death,  as  an 
open  idolatress  in  the  sight  of  God,  and  a  cruel  murderer  of 
His  saints  before  men,  and  merciless  traitress  to  her  own 
native  country." 

Behind  the  wild  rhetoric  of  words  like  these  lay  the  new 
sense  of  a  prophetic  power,  the  sense  of  a  divine  commis- 
sion given  to  the  preachers  of  the  Word  to  rebuke  nobles 
and  kings.  At  the  moment  when  the  policy  of  Cromwell 
crushed  the  Church  as  a  political  power  and  freed  the  grow- 
ing Monarchy  from  the  constitutional  check  which  its  in- 
dependence furnished,  a  new  check  offered  itself  in  the 
very  enthusiasm  which  sprang  out  of  the  wreck  of  the 
great  religious  body.  Men  stirred  with  a  new  sense  of 
righteousness  and  of  a  divine  government  of  the  world, 
men  too  whose  natural  boldness  was  quickened  and  fired 
by  daily  contact  with  the  older  seers  who  rebuked  David 
or  Jezebel,  could  not  hold  their  peace  in  the  presence  of 
wrong.  While  nobles  and  statesmen  were  cowering  in 
silence  before  the  dreaded  power  of  the  Kingship  the 
preachers  spoke  bluntly  out.  Not  only  Latimer,  but 
Knox,  Grindal,  and  Lever  had  uttered  fiery  remonstrances 
against  the  plunderers  of  Edward's  reign.  Bradford  had 
threatened  them  with  the  divine  judgment  which  at  last 
overtook  them.  "'The  judgment  of  the  Lord!  The 
judgment  of  the  Lord !'  cried  he,  with  a  lamentable  voice 
and  weeping  tears."  Wise  or  unwise,  the  pamphlets  of 
the  exiles  only  carried  on  this  theory  to  its  full  develop- 
ment. The  great  conception  of  the  mediaeval  Church,  that 
of  the  responsibility  of  Kings  to  a  spiritual  power,  was 
revived  at  an  hour  when  Kingship  was  trampling  all  re- 
sponsibility to  God  or  man  beneath  its  feet.  Such  a  re- 
vival was  to  have  large  and  beneficial  issues  in  our  later 
history.  Gathering  strength  under  Elizabeth,  it  created 
at  the  close  of  her  reign  that  moral  force  of  public  opinion 
which  under  the  name  of  Puritanism  brought  the  acts  and 
policy  of  our  kings  to  the  tests  of  reason  and  the  Gospel. 

13  VOL.  2 


288  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

However  ill  directed  that  force  might  be,  however  errone- 
ously such  tests  were  often  applied,  it  is  to  this  new  force 
that  we  owe  the  restoration  of  liberty  and  the  establish- 
ment of  religious  freedom.  As  the  voice  of  the  first  Chris- 
tian preachers  had  broken  the  despotism  of  the  Roman 
ISmpire,  so  thp  voice  of  the  preachers  of  Puritanism  broke 
the  despotism  of  the  English  Monarchy. 

But  great  as  their  issues  were  to  be,  for  the  moment 
these  protests  only  quickened  the  persecution  at  home. 
We  can  hardly  wonder  that  the  arrival  of  Goodman's  book 
in  England  in  the  summer  of  1558  was  followed  by  stern 
measures  to  prevent  the  circulation  of  such  incentives  to 
revolt.  "  Whereas  divers  books, "  ran  a  royal  proclamation, 
"  filled  with  heresy,  sedition,  and  treason,  have  of  late  and 
be  daily  brought  into  the  realm  out  of  foreign  countries 
and  places  beyond  seas,  and  some  also  covertly  printed 
within  this  realm  and  cast  abroad  in  sundry  parts  thereof, 
whereby  not  only  God  is  dishonored  but  also  encourage- 
ment is  given  to  disobey  lawful  princes  and  governors," 
any  person  possessing  such  books  "  shall  be  reported  and 
taken  for  a  rebel,  and  shall  without  delay  be  executed  for 
that  offence  according  to  the  order  of  martial  law."  But 
what  really  robbed  these  pamphlets  of  all  force  for  harm 
was  the  prudence  and  foresight  of  the  people  itself.  Never 
indeed  did  the  nation  show  its  patient  good  sense  more 
clearly  than  in  the  later  years  of  Mary's  reign.  While 
fires  blazed  in  Smithfield,  and  news  of  defeat  came  from 
over  sea,  while  the  hot  voices  of  Protestant  zealots  hounded 
men  on  to  assassination  and  revolt,  the  bulk  of  English- 
men looked  quietly  from  the  dying  Queen .  to  the  girl  who 
in  a  little  while  must  wear  her  crown.  What  nerved  men 
to  endure  the  shame  and  bloodshed  about  them  was  the 
certainty  of  the  speedy  succession  of  the  daughter  of  Anne 
Boleyn.  Elizabeth  was  now  in  her  twenty-fifth  yeai. 
Personally  she  had  much  of  her  mother's  charm  with  more 
than  her  mother's  beauty.  Her  figure  was  commanding, 
her  face  long  but  queenly  and  intelligent,  her  eyes  quick 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  289 

and  fine.  She  had  grown  up  amid  the  liberal  culture  of 
Henry's  court  a  bold  horsewoman,  a  good  shot,  a  graceful 
dancer  a  skilled  musician,  and  an  accomplished  scholar. 
Even  among  the  highly-trained  women  who  caught  the 
impulse  of  the  New  Learning  she  stood  in  the  extent  of 
her  acquirements  without  a  peer.  Ascham,  who  succeeded 
Grindal  and  Cheke  in  the  direction  of  her  studies,  tells  us 
how  keen  and  resolute  was  Elizabeth's  love  of  learning, 
even  in  her  girlhood.  At  sixteen  she  already  showed  "a 
man's  power  of  application"  to  her  books.  She  had  read 
almost  the  whole  of  Cicero  and  a  great  part  of  Livy.  Sha 
began  the  day  with  the  study  of  the  New  Testament  in 
Greek,  and  followed  this  up  by  reading  selected  orations 
of  Isocrates  and  the  tragedies  of  Sophocles.  She  could 
speak  Latin  with  fluency  and  Greek  moderately  well. 
Her  love  of  classical  culture  lasted  through  her  life. 
Amid  the  press  and  cares  of  her  later  reign  we  find  Ascham 
recording  how  "  after  dinner  I  went  up  to  read  with  the 
Queen's  majesty  that  noble  oration  of  Demosthenes  against 
^schines."  At  a  later  time  her  Latin  served  her  to  re- 
buke the  insolence  of  a  Polish  ambassador,  and  she  could 
"  rub  up  her  rusty  Greek"  at  need  to  bandy  pedantry  with 
a  Vice-Chancellor.  But  Elizabeth  was  far  as  yet  from 
being  a  mere  pedant.  She  could  already  speak  French 
and  Italian  as  fluently  as  her  mother-tongue.  In  later 
days  we  find  her  familiar  with  Ariosto  and  Tasso.  The 
purity  of  her  literary  taste,  the  love  for  a  chaste  and  sim- 
ple style,  which  Ascham  noted  with  praise  in  her  girlhood, 
had  not  yet  perished  under  the  influence  of  euphuism. 
But  even  amidst  the  affectation  and  love  of  anagrams  and 
puerilities  which  sullied  her  later  years  Elizabeth  remained 
a  lover  of  letters  and  of  all  that  was  greatest  and  purest  in 
letters.  She  listened  with  delight  to  the  "  Faery  Queen" 
and  found  a  smile  for  "  Master  Spenser"  when  he  appeared 
in  her  presence. 

From  the  bodily  and  mental  energy  of  her  girlhood,  the 
close  of  Edward's  reign  drew  Elizabeth  at  nineteen  to  face 


290  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

the  sterner  problems  of  religion  and  politics.  In  the  daring 
attempt  of  Northumberland  to  place  Jane  Grey  on  the 
throne  Elizabeth's  rights  were  equally  set  aside  with 
those  of  Mary ;  and  the  first  public  act  of  the  girl  was  to 
call  the  gentry  to  her  standard  and  to  join  her  sister  with 
five  hundred  followers  in  her  train.  But  the  momentary 
union  was  soon  dissolved.  The  daughter  of  Catharine 
could  look  with  little  but  hate  on  the  daughter  of  Anne 
Boleyn.  Elizabeth's  tendency  to  the  "  new  religion"  jarred 
with  the  Queen's  bigotry ;  and  the  warnings  of  the  impe- 
rial ambassador  were  hardly  needful  to  spur  Mary  to 
watch  jealously  a  possible  pretender  to  her  throne.  The 
girl  bent  to  the  Queen's  will  in  hearing  mass,  but  her 
manner  showed  that  the  compromise  was  merely  a  matter 
of  obedience,  and  fed  the  hopes  of  the  Protestant  zealots, 
who  saw  in  the  Spanish  marriage  a  chance  of  driving 
Mary  from  the  throne.  The  resolve  which  the  Queen 
showed  to  cancel  her  sister's  right  of  succession  only 
quickened  the  project  for  setting  Elizabeth  in  her  place ; 
and  it  was  to  make  Elizabeth  their  sovereign  that  Suffolk 
rose  in  Leicestershire  and  Wyatt  and  his  Kentishmen 
marched  against  London  Bridge.  The  failure  of  the  rising 
seemed  to  insure  her  doom.  The  Emperor  pressed  for  her 
death  as  a  security  for  Philip  on  his  arrival ;  and  the  de- 
tection of  a  correspondence  with  the  French  King  served 
as  a  pretext  for  her  committal  to  the  Tower.  The  fierce 
Tudor  temper  broke  through  Elizabeth's  self-control  as  she 
landed  at  Traitor's  Gate.  "  Are  all  these  harnessed  men 
there  for  me?"  she  cried  as  she  saw  the  guard,  "it  needed 
not  for  me,  being  but  a  weak  woman !"  and  passionately 
calling  on  the  soldiers  to  "  bear  witness  that  I  come  as  no 
traitor !"  she  flung  herself  down  on  a  stone  in  the  rain  and 
refused  to  enter  her  prison.  "Better  sitting  here  than  in 
a  worse  place,"  she  cried;  "I  know  not  whither  you  will 
bring  me."  But  Elizabeth's  danger  was  less  than  it 
seemed.  Wyatt  denied  to  the  last  her  complicity  in  the 
fevoit,  *nd  in  spite  of  Gardiner's  will  to  "  go  roundly  to 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  291 

work"  with  her  the  Lords  of  the  Council  forced  Mary  to 
set  her  free.  The  Queen's  terrors  however  revived  with 
her  hopes  of  a  child  in  the  summer  of  1555.  To  Mary  her 
sister  seemed  the  one  danger  which  threatened  the  succes- 
sion of  her  coming  babe  and  the  vast  issues  which  hung 
upon  it,  and  Elizabeth  was  summoned  to  her  sister's  side 
and  kept  a  close  prisoner  at  Hampton  Court.  Philip 
joined  in  this  precaution,  for  "holding  her  in  his  power 
he  could  depart  safely  and  without  peril"  in  the  event  of 
the  Queen's  death  in  childbirth ;  and  other  plans  were  per- 
haps already  stirring  his  breast.  Should  Mary  die,  a  fresh 
match  might  renew  his  hold  on  England;  "he  might 
hope,"  writes  the  Venetian  ambassador,  "with  the  help  of 
many  of  the  nobility,  won  over  by  his  presents  and  favors, 
to  marry  her  (Elizabeth)  again,  and  thus  succeed  anew  to 
the  crown." 

But  whatever  may  have  been  Philip's  designs,  the  time 
had  not  as  yet  come  for  their  realization ;  the  final  disap- 
pointment of  the  Queen's  hopes  of  childbirth  set  Elizabeth 
free,  and  in  July  she  returned  to  her  house  at  Ashridge. 
From  this  moment  her  position  was  utterly  changed. 
With  the  disappearance  of  all  chance  of  offspring  from 
the  Queen  and  the  certainty  of  Mary's  coming  death  her 
sister's  danger  passed  away.  Elizabeth  alone  stood  be- 
tween England  and  the  succession  of  Mary  Stuart;  and, 
whatever  might  be  the  wishes  of  the  Queen,  the  policy  of 
the  House  of  Austria  forced  it  to  support  even  the  daughter 
of  Anne  Boleyn  against  a  claimant  who  would  bind  Eng- 
land to  the  French  monarchy.  From  this  moment  there- 
fore Philip  watched  jealously  over  Elizabeth's  safety.  On 
his  departure  for  the  Continent  he  gave  written  instruc- 
tions to  the  Queen  to  show  favor  to  her  sister,  and  the 
charge  was  repeated  to  those  of  his  followers  whom  he  left 
behind  him.  What  guarded  her  even  more  effectually 
was  the  love  of  the  people.  When  Philip  at  a  later  time 
claimed  Elizabeth's  gratitude  for  his  protection  she  told 
him  bluntly  that  her  gratitude  was  really  due  neither  to 


292  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

him  nor  her  nobles,  though  she  owned  her  obligations  to 
both,  but  to  the  English  people.  It  was  they  who  had 
saved  her  from  death  and  hindered  all  projects  for  barring 
her  right  to  the  throne.  "  It  is  the  people, "  she  said,  "  who 
have  placed  me  where  I  am  now."  It  was  indeed  their 
faith  in  Elizabeth's  speedy  succession  that  enabled  Eng- 
lishmen to  bear  the  bloodshed  and  shame  of  Mary's  later 
'years,  and  to  wait  patiently  for  the  end. 

Nor  were  these  years  of  waiting  without  value  for  Eliza- 
beth herself.  The  steady  purpose,  the  clear  perception  of 
a  just  policy  which  ran  through  her  wonderful  reign,  were 
formed  as  the  girl  looked  coolly  on  at  the  chaos  of  bigotry 
and  misrule  which  spread  before  her.  More  and  more  she 
realized  what  was  to  be  the  aim  of  her  after  life,  the  aim 
of  reuniting  the  England  which  Edward  and  Mary  alike 
had  rent  into  two  warring  nations,  of  restoring  again  that 
English  independence  which  Mary  was  trailing  at  the  feet 
of  Spain.  With  such  an  aim  she  could  draw  to  her  the 
men  who,  indifferent  like  herself  to  purely  spiritual  con- 
siderations, and  estranged  from  Mary's  system  rather  by 
its  political  than  its  religious  consequences,  were  anxious 
for  the  restoration  of  English  independence  and  English 
order.  It  was  among  these  "Politicals,"  as  they  were 
soon  to  be  called,  that  Elizabeth  found  at  this  moment 
a  counsellor  who  was  to  stand  by  her  side  through  the  long 
years  of  her  after  reign.  William  Cecil  sprang  from  the 
smaller  gentry  whom  the  changes  of  the  time  were  bring- 
ing to  the  front.  He  was  the  son  of  a  Yeoman  of  the 
Wardrobe  at  Henry's  court;  but  his  abilities  had  already 
raised  him  at  the  age  of  twenty-seven  to  the  post  of  secre- 
tary to  the  Duke  of  Somerset,  and  through  Somerset's 
Protectorate  he  remained  high  in  his  confidence.  He  was 
seized  by  the  Lords  on  the  Duke's  arrest,  and  even  sent  to 
the  Tower;  but  he  was  set  at  liberty  with  his  master,  and 
his  ability  was  now  so  well  known  that  a  few  months  later 
saw  him  Secretary  of  State  under  Northumberland.  The 
post  and  the  knighthood  which  accompanied  it  hardly 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  293 

compensated  for  the  yoke  which  Northumberland's  pride 
laid  upon  all  who  served  him,  or  for  the  risks  in  which  his 
ambition  involved  them.  Cecil  saw  with  a  fatal  clearness 
the  silent  opposition  of  the  whole  realm  to  the  system  of 
the  Protectorate,  and  the  knowledge  of  this  convinced 
him  that  the  Duke's  schemes  for  a  change  in  the  succes- 
sion were  destined  to  failure.  On  the  disclosure  of  the 
plot  to  set  Mary  aside  he  withdrew  for  some  days  from  the 
Court,  and  even  meditated  flight  from  the  country,  till 
fear  of  the  young  King's  wrath  drew  him  back  to  share  in 
the  submission  of  his  fellow-counsellors  and  to  pledge  him- 
self with  them  to  carry  the  new  settlement  into  effect. 
But  Northumberland  had  no  sooner  quitted  London  than 
Cecil  became  the  soul  of  the  intrigues  by  which  the  royal 
Council  declared  themselves  in  Mary's  favor.  His  deser- 
tion of  the  Duke  secured  him  pardon  from  the  Queen,  and 
though  he  was  known  to  be  in  heart  "  a  heretic"  he  con- 
tinued at  court,  conformed  like  Elizabeth  to  the  established 
religion,  confessed  and  attended  mass.  Cecil  was  em- 
ployed in  bringing  Pole  to  England  and  in  attending  him 
in  embassies  abroad.  But  his  caution  held  him  aloof  from 
any  close  connection  with  public  affairs.  He  busied  him- 
self in  building  at  Burghley  and  in  the  culture  of  the 
Church  lands  he  had  won  from  Edward  the  Sixth,  while 
he  drew  closer  to  the  girl  who  alone  could  rescue  England 
from  the  misgovernment  of  Mary's  rule.  Even  before  the 
Queen's  death  it  was  known  that  Cecil  would  be  the  chief 
counsellor  of  the  coming  reign.  "I  am  told  for  certain," 
the  Spanish  ambassador  wrote  to  Philip  after  a  visit  to 
Elizabeth  during  the  last  hours  of  Mary's  life,  "  that  Cecil 
who  was  secretary  to  King  Edward  will  be  her  secretary 
also.  He  has  the  character  of  a  prudent  and  virtuous 
man,  although  a  heretic."  But  it  was  only  from  a  belief 
that  Cecil  retained  at  heart  the  convictions  of  his  earlier 
days  that  men  could  call  him  a  heretic.  In  all  outer  mat^ 
ters  of  faith  or  worship  he  conformed  to  the  religion  of  the 
state. 


294  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

It  is  idle  to  charge  Cecil,  or  the  mass  of  Englishmen 
who  conformed  with  him  in  turn  to  the  religion  of  Henry, 
of  Edward,  of  Mary,  and  of  Elizabeth,  with  baseness  or 
hypocrisy.  They  followed  the  accepted  doctrine  of  the 
time — that  every  realm,  through  its  rulers,  had  the  sole 
right  of  determining  what  should  be  the  form  of  religion 
within  its  bounds.  What  the  Marian  persecution  was 
gradually  pressing  on  such  men  was  a  conviction,  not  of 
the  falsehood  of  such  a  doctrine,  but  of  the  need  of  limit- 
ing it.  Under  Henry,  under  Edward,  under  Mary,  no 
distinction  had  been  drawn  between  inner  belief  and  outer 
conformity.  Every  English  subject  was  called  upon  to 
adjust  his  conscience  as  well  as  his  conduct  to  the  varying 
policy  of  the  state.  But  the  fires  of  Smithfield  had  proved 
that  obedience  such  as  this  could  not  be  exacted  save  by  a 
persecution  which  filled  all  England  with  horror.  Such  a 
persecution  indeed  failed  in  the  very  end  for  which  it  was 
wrought.  Instead  of  strengthening  religious  unity,  it 
gave  a  new  force  to  religious  separation ;  it  enlisted  the 
conscience  of  the  zealot  in  the  cause  of  resistance ;  it  se- 
cured the  sympathy  of  the  great  mass  of  waverers  to  those 
who  withstood  the  civil  power.  To  Cecil,  as  to  the  purely 
political  statesmen  of  whom  he  was  the  type,  such  a  perse- 
cution seemed  as  needless  as  it  was  mischievous.  Con- 
formity indeed  was  necessary,  for  men  could  as  yet  con- 
ceive of  no  state  without  a  religion  or  of  civil  obedience 
apart  from  compliance  with  the  religious  order  of  the  state. 
But  only  outer  conformity  was  needed.  That  no  man 
should  set  up  a  worship  other  than  that  of  the  nation  at 
large,  that  every  subject  should  duly  attend  at  the  national 
worship,  Cecil  believed  to  be  essential  to  public  order. 
But  he  saw  no  need  for  prying  into  the  actual  beliefs  of 
those  who  conformed  to  the  religious  laws  of  the  realm, 
nor  did  he  think  that  such  beliefs  could  be  changed  by  the 
fear  of  punishment.  While  refusing  freedom  of  worship 
therefore,  Cecil,  like  Elizabeth,  was  ready  to  concede  free- 
dom of  conscience.  And  in  this  concession  we  can  hardly 


CHAP.  2.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  295 

doubt  that  the  bulk  of  Englishmen  went  with  him. 
Catholics  shared  with  Protestants  the  horror  of  Mary's 
persecution.  To  Protestantism  indeed  the  horror  of  the 
persecution  had  done  much  to  give  a  force  such  as  it  had 
never  had  before.  The  number  of  Protestants  grew  with 
every  murder  done  in  the  cause  of  Catholicism.  But  they 
still  remained  a  small  part  of  the  realm.  What  the  bulk 
of  Englishmen  had  been  driven  to  by  the  martyrdoms  was 
not  a  change  of  creed,  but  a  longing  for  religious  peace 
and  for  such  a  system  of  government  as,  without  destroy- 
ing the  spiritual  oneness  of  the  nation,  would  render  a  re- 
ligious peace  possible.  And  such  a  system  of  government 
Cecil  and  Elizabeth  were  prepared  to  give. 

We  may  ascribe  to  Cecil's  counsels  somewhat  of  the 
wise  patience  with  which  Elizabeth  waited  for  the  coming 
crown.  Her  succession  was  assured,  and  the  throng  of 
visitors  to  her  presence  showed  a  general  sense  that  the 
Queen's  end  was  near.  Mary  stood  lonely  and  desolate  in 
her  realm.  "  I  will  not  be  buried  while  I  am  living,  as 
my  sister  was,"  Elizabeth  said  in  later  years.  "  Do  I  not 
know  how  during  her  life  every  one  hastened  to  me  at 
Hatfield?"  The  bloodshed  indeed  went  on  more  busily 
than  ever.  It  had  spread  now  from  bishops  and  priests  to 
the  people  itself,  and  the  sufferers  were  sent  in  batches  to 
the  flames.  In  a  single  day  thirteen  victims,  two  of  them 
women,  were  burned  at  Stratford- le-Bow.  Seventy-three 
Protestants  of  Colchester  were  dragged  through  the  streets 
of  London  tied  to  a  single  rope.  A  new  commission  for 
the  suppression  of  heresy  was  exempted  by  royal  authority 
from  all  restrictions  of  law  which  fettered  its  activity. 
But  the  work  of  terror  broke  down  before  the  silent  revolt 
of  the  whole  nation.  The  persecution  failed  even  to  put 
an  end  to  heretical  worship.  Not  only  do  we  find  ministers 
moving  about  in  London  and  Kent  to  hold  "  secret  meet- 
ings of  the  Gospellers,"  but  up  to  the  middle  of  1555  four 
parishes  in  Essex  still  persisted  in  using  the  English 
Prayer-book.  Open  marks  of  sympathy  at  last  began  to 


296  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

be  offered  to  the  victims  at  the  stake.  "  There  were  seven 
men  burned  in  Smithfield  the  twenty-eighth  day  of  July," 
a  Londoner  writes  in  1558,  "a  fearful  and  a  cruel  procla- 
mation being  made  that  under  pain  of  present  death  no 
man  should  either  approach  nigh  unto  them,  touch  them, 
neither  speak  to  them  nor  comfort  them.  Yet  were  they 
so  comfortably  taken  by  the  hand  and  so  goodly  comforted, 
notwithstanding  that  fearful  proclamation  and  the  present 
threatenings  of  the  sheriffs  and  sergeants,  that  the  ad- 
versaries themselves  were  astonished."  The  crowd  round 
the  fire  shouted  "Amen"  to  the  martyrs'  prayers,  and 
prayed  with  them  that  God  would  strengthen  them. 
What  galled  Mary  yet  more  was  the  ill  will  of  the  Pope. 
Paul  the  Fourth  still  adhered  to  his  demand  for  full 
restoration  of  the  Church  lands,  and  held  England  as  only 
partly  reconciled  to  the  Holy  See.  He  was  hostile  to 
Philip ;  he  was  yet  more  hostile  to  Pole.  At  this  moment 
he  dealt  a  last  blow  at  the  Queen  by  depriving  Pole  of  his 
legatine  power,  and  was  believed  to  be  on  the  point  of  call- 
ing him  to  answer  a  charge  of  heresy.  Even  when  she 
was  freed  from  part  of  her  troubles  in  the  autumn  of  1558 
by  the  opening  of  conferences  for  peace  at  Cambray  a 
fresh  danger  disclosed  itself.  The  demands  of  the  Queen's 
envoys  for  the  restoration  of  Calais  met  with  so  stubborn 
a  refusal  from  France  that  it  seemed  as  if  England  would 
be  left  alone  to  bear  the  brunt  of  a  future  struggle,  for 
Mary's  fierce  pride,  had  she  lived,  could  hardly  have 
bowed  to  the  surrender  of  the  town.  But  the  Queen  was 
dying.  Her  health  had  long  been  weak,  and  the  miseries 
and  failure  of  her  reign  hastened  the  progress  of  disease. 
Already  enfeebled,  she  was  attacked  as  winter  drew  near 
by  a  fever  which  was  at  this  time  ravaging  the  country, 
and  on  the  seventeenth  of  November,  1558,  she  breathed 
her  last 


CHAPTER  III. 

THE  ENGLAND   OF  ELIZABETH. 
1558—1561. 

TRADITION  still  points  out  the  tree  in  Hatfield  Park  b*- 
neath  which  Elizabeth  was  sitting  when  she  received  the 
news  of  her  peaceful  accession  to  the  throne.  She  fell  on 
her  knees  and  drawing  a  long  breath,  exclaimed  at  last, 
"  It  is  the  Lord's  doing,  and  it  is  marvellous  in  our  eyes." 
To  the  last  these  words  remained  stamped  on  the  golden 
coinage  of  the  Queen.  The  sense  never  left  her  that  her 
preservation  and  her  reign  were  the  issues  of  a  direct  in- 
terposition of  God.  Daring  and  self-confident  indeed  as 
was  her  temper,  it  was  awed  into  seriousness  by  the 
weight  of  responsibility  which  fell  on  her  with  her  sister's 
death.  Never  had  the  fortunes  of  England  sunk  to  a  lower 
ebb.  Dragged  at  the  heels  of  Philip  into  a  useless  and 
ruinous  war,  the  country  was  left  without  an  ally  save 
Spain.  The  loss  of  Calais  gave  France  the  mastery  of  the 
Channel,  and  seemed  to  English  eyes  "to  introduce  the 
French  King  within  the  threshold  of  our  house."  "If 
God  start  not  forth  to  the  helm,"  wrote  the  Council  in  an 
appeal  to  the  country,  "we  be  at  the  point  of  greatest 
misery  that  can  happen  to  any  people,  which  is  to  become 
thrall  to  a  foreign  nation."  The  French  King,  in  fact, 
"  bestrode  the  realm,  having  one  foot  in  Calais  and  the 
other  in  Scotland."  Ireland  too  was  torn  with  civil  war, 
while  Scotland,  always  a  danger  in  the  north,  had  become 
formidable  through  the  French  marriage  of  its  Queen.  In 
presence  of  enemies  such  as  these,  the  country  lay  helpless, 
without  army  or  fleet,  or  the  means  of  manning  one,  for 
the  treasury,  already  drained  by  the  waste  of  Edward's 


298  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

reign,  had  been  utterly  exhausted  by  the  restoration  of  the 
church-lands  in  possession  of  the  Crown  and  by  the  cost 
of  the  war  with  France.  But  formidable  as  was  the  dan- 
ger from  without,  it  was  little  to  the  danger  from  within. 
The  country  was  humiliated  by  defeat  and  brought  to  the 
verge  of  rebellion  by  the  bloodshed  and  misgovernment  of 
Mary's  reign.  The  social  discontent  which  had  been 
trampled  down  for  a  while  by  the  horsemen  of  Somerset 
remained  a  menace  to  further  order.  Above  all,  the  relig- 
ious strife  had  passed  beyond  hope  of  reconciliation  now 
that  the  reformers  were  parted  from  their  opponents  by  the 
fires  of  Smithfield  and  the  party  of  the  New  Learning  all 
but  dissolved.  The  more  earnest  Catholics  were  bound 
helplessly  to  Home.  The  temper  of  the  Protestants, 
burned  at  home  or  driven  into  exile  abroad,  had  become  a 
fiercer  thing,  and  the  Calvinistic  refugees  were  pouring 
back  from  Geneva  with  dreams  of  revolutionary  changes 
in  Church  and  State. 

It  was  with  the  religious  difficulty  that  Elizabeth  was 
called  first  to  deal ;  and  the  way  in  which  she  dealt  with 
it  showed  at  once  the  peculiar  bent  of  her  mind.  The 
young  Queen  was  not  without  a  sense  of  religion ;  at  mo- 
ments of  peril  or  deliverance  throughout  her  reign  her 
acknowledgments  of  a  divine  protection  took  a  strange 
depth  and  earnestness.  But  she  was  almost  wholly  desti- 
tute of  spiritual  emotion,  or  of  any  consciousness  of  the 
vast  questions  with  which  theology  strove  to  deal.  While 
the  world  around  her  was  being  swayed  more  and  more 
by  theological  beliefs  and  controversies,  Elizabeth  was  ab- 
solutely untouched  by  them.  She  was  a  child  of  the  Italian 
Renascence  rather  than  of  the  New  Learning  of  Colet  or 
Erasmus,  and  her  attitude  toward  the  enthusiasm  of  her 
time  was  that  of  Lorenzo  de'  Medici  toward  Savonarola. 
Her  mind  was  untroubled  by  the  spiritual  problems  which 
were  vexing  the  minds  around  her;  to  Elizabeth  indeed 
they  were  not  only  unintelligible,  they  were  a  little  ridicu- 
lous. She  had  been  brought  up  under  Henry  amid  the 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  299 

ritual  of  the  older  Church ;  under  Edward  she  had  sub- 
mitted to  the  English  Prayer-book,  and  drunk  in  much  of 
the  Protestant  theology ;  under  Mary  she  was  ready  after 
a  slight  resistance  to  conform  again  to  the  mass.  Her 
temper  remained  unchanged  through  the  whole  course  of 
her  reign.  She  showed  the  same  intellectual  contempt  for 
the  superstition  of  the  Romanist  as  for  the  bigotry  of  the 
Protestant.  While  she  ordered  Catholic  images  to  be 
flung  into  the  fire,  she  quizzed  the  Puritans  as  "  brethren 
in  Christ."  But  she  had  no  sort  of  religious  aversion 
from  either  Puritan  or  Papist.  The  Protestants  grumbled 
at  the  Catholic  nobles  whom  she  admitted  to  the  presence. 
The  Catholics  grumbled  at  the  Protestant  statesmen  whom 
she  called  to  her  council  board.  To  Elizabeth  on  the  other 
hand  the  arrangement  was  the  most  natural  thing  in  the 
world.  She  looked  at  theological  differences  in  a  purely 
political  light.  She  agreed  with  Henry  the  Fourth  that  a 
kingdom  was  well  worth  a  mass.  It  seemed  an  obvious 
thing  to  her  to  hold  out  hopes  of  conversion  as  a  means  of 
deceiving  Philip,  or  to  gain  a  point  in  negotiation  by  re- 
storing the  crucifix  to  her  chapel.  The  first  interest  in  her 
own  mind  was  the  interest  of  public  order,  and  she  never 
could  understand  how  it  could  fail  to  be  the  first  in  every 
one's  mind. 

One  memorable  change  marked  the  nobler  side  of  the 
policy  she  brought  with  her  to  the  throne.  Elizabeth's 
accession  was  at  once  followed  by  a  close  of  the  religious 
persecution.  Whatever  might  be  the  changes  that  awaited 
the  country,  conformity  was  no  longer  to  be  enforced  by 
the  penalty  of  death.  At  a  moment  when  Philip  was  pre- 
siding at  autos-da-fe  and  Henry  of  Franca  plotting  a 
massacre  of  his  Huguenot  subjects,  such  a  resolve  was  a 
gain  for  humanity  as  well  as  a  step  toward  religious  toler- 
ation. And  from  this  resolve  Elizabeth  never  wavered. 
Through  all  her  long  reign,  save  a  few  Anabaptists  whom 
the  whole  nation  loathed  as  blasphemers  of  God  and  dreaded 
as  enemies  of  social  order,  no  heretic  was  "  sent  to  the 


300  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

fire."  It  was  a  far  greater  gain  for  humanity  when  the 
Queen  declared  her  will  to  meddle  in  no  way  with  the  con- 
sciences of  her  subjects.  She  would  hear  of  no  inquisi- 
tion into  a  man's  private  thoughts  on  religious  matters  or 
into  his  personal  religion.  Cecil  could  boldly  assert  in  her 
name  at  a  later  time  the  right  of  every  Englishman  to 
perfect  liberty  of  religious  opinion.  Such  a  liberty  of 
opinion  by  no  means  implied  liberty  of  public  worship. 
On  the  incompatibility  of  freedom  of  worship  with  public 
order  Catholic  and  Protestant  were  as  yet  at  one.  The 
most  advanced  reformers  did  not  dream  of  contending  for 
a  right  to  stand  apart  from  the  national  religion.  What 
they  sought  was  to  make  the  national  religion  their  own. 
The  tendency  of  the  reformation  had  been  to  press  for  the 
religious  as  well  as  the  political  unity  of  every  state. 
Even  Calvin  looked  forward  to  the  winning  of  the  nations 
to  a  purer  faith  without  a  suspicion  that  the  religious 
movement  which  he  headed  would  end  in  establishing  the 
right  even  of  the  children  of  "  antichrist"  to  worship  as 
they  would  in  a  Protestant  commonwealth.  If  the  Protes- 
tant lords  in  Scotland  had  been  driven  to  assert  a  right  of 
nonconformity,  if  the  Huguenots  of  France  were  follow- 
ing their  example,  it  was  with  no  thought  of  asserting 
the  right  of  every  man  to  worship  God  as  he  would. 
From  the  claim  of  such  a  right  Knox  or  Coligni  would 
have  shrunk  with  even  greater  horror  than  Elizabeth. 
What  they  aimed  at  was  simply  the  establishment  of  a 
truce  till  by  force  or  persuasion  they  could  win  the  realms 
that  tolerated  them  for  their  own.  In  this  matter  there- 
fore Elizabeth  was  at  one  with  every  statesman  of  her  day. 
While  granting  freedom  of  conscience  to  her  subjects,  she 
was  resolute  to  exact  an  outward  conformity  to  the  estab- 
lished religion. 

But  men  watched  curiously  to  see  what  religion  the 
Queen  would  establish.  Even  before  her  accession  the 
keen  eye  of  the  Spanish  ambassador  had  noted  her  "  great 
admiration  for  the  king  her  father's  mode  of  carrying  on 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  301 

matters,"  as  a  matter  of  ill  omen  for  the  interests  of  Cath- 
olicism. He  had  marked  that  the  ladies  about  her  and 
the  counsellors  on  whom  she  seemed  about  to  rely  were, 
like  Cecil,  "held  to  be  heretics."  "I  fear  much,"  he 
wrote,  "that  in  religion  she  will  not  go  right."  As  keen 
an  instinct  warned  the  Protestants  that  the  tide  had  turned. 
The  cessation  of  the  burnings,  and  the  release  of  all  per- 
sons imprisoned  for  religion,  seemed  to  receive  their  inter- 
pretation when  Elizabeth  on  her  entry  into  London  kissed 
an  English  Bible  which  the  citizens  presented  to  her  and 
promised  "diligently  to  read  therein."  The  exiles  at 
Strassburg  or  Geneva  flocked  home  with  wild  dreams  of  a 
religious  revolution  and  of  vengeance  upon  their  foes. 
But  hopes  and  fears  alike  met  a  startling  check.  For 
months  there  was  little  change  in  either  government  or 
religion.  If  Elizabeth  introduced  Cecil  and  his  kinsman, 
Sir  Nicholas  Bacon,  to  her  council  board,  she  retained  as 
yet  most  of  her  sister's  advisers.  The  Mass  went  on  as 
before,  and  the  Queen  was  regular  in  her  attendance  at  it. 
As  soon  as  the  revival  of  Protestantism  showed  itself  in 
controversial  sermons  and  insults  to  the  priesthood  it  was 
bridled  by  a  proclamation  which  forbade  unlicensed  preach- 
ing and  enforced  silence  on  the  religious  controversy. 
Elizabeth  showed  indeed  a  distaste  for  the  elevation  of  the 
Host,  and  allowed  the  Lord's  Prayer,  Creed,  and  Ten 
Commandments  to  be  used  in  English.  But  months 
passed  after  her  accession  before  she  would  go  further  than 
this.  A  royal  proclamation  which  ordered  the  existing 
form  of  worship  to  be  observed  "  till  consultation  might  be 
had  in  Parliament  by  the  Queen  and  the  Three  Estates" 
startled  the  prelates ;  and  only  one  bishop  could  be  found 
to  assist  at  the  coronation  of  Elizabeth.  But  no  change 
was  made  in  the  ceremonies  of  the  coronation ;  the  Queen 
took  the  customary  oath  to  observe  the  liberties  of  the 
Church,  and  conformed  to  the  Catholic  ritual.  There  was 
little  in  fact  to  excite  any  reasonable  alarm  among  the 
adherents  of  the  older  faith,  or  any  reasonable  hope  among 


302  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

the  adherents  of  the  new.  "I  will  do,"  the  Queen  said, 
"as  my  father  did."  Instead  of  the  reforms  of  Edward 
and  the  Protectorate,  the  Protestants  saw  themselves 
thrown  back  on  the  reforms  of  Henry  the  Eighth.  Even 
.Henry's  system  indeed  seemed  too  extreme  for  Elizabeth. 
Her  father  had  at  any  rate  broken  boldly  from  the  Papacy. 
But  the  first  work  of  the  Queen  was  to  open  negotiations 
for  her  recognition  with  the  Papal  Court. 

What  shaped  Elizabeth's  course  in  fact  was  hard  neces- 
sity. She  found  herself  at  war  with  France  and  Scotland, 
and  her  throne  threatened  by  the  claim  of  the  girl  who 
linked  the  two  countries,  the  claim  of  Mary  Stuart,  at 
once  Queen  of  Scotland  and  wife  of  the  Dauphin  Francis. 
On  Elizabeth's  accession  Mary  and  Francis  assumed  by 
the  French  King's  order  the  arms  and  style  of  English 
sovereigns :  and  if  war  continued  it  was  clear  that  their 
pretensions  would  be  backed  by  Henry's  forces  as  well  as 
by  the  efforts  of  the  Scots.  Against  such  a  danger  Philip 
of  Spain  was  Elizabeth's  only  ally.  Philip's  policy  was 
at  this  time  a  purely  conservative  one.  The  vast  schemes 
of  ambition  which  had  so  often  knit  both  Pope  and  Protes- 
tants, Germany  and  France,  against  his  father  were  set 
aside  by  the  young  King.  His  position  indeed  was  very 
different  from  that  of  Charles  the  Fifth.  He  was  not 
Emperor.  He  had  little  weight  in  Germany.  Even  in 
Italy  his  influence  was  less  than  his  father's.  He  had  lost 
with  Mary's  death  the  crown  of  England.  His  most  valu- 
able possessions  outside  Spain,  the  provinces  of  the  Nether- 
lands, were  disaffected  to  a  foreign  rule.  All  the  King 
•therefore  aimed  at  was  to  keep  his  own.  But  the  Nether- 
lands were  hard  to  keep:  and  with  France  mistress  of 
England  as  of  Scotland,  and  so  mistress  of  the  Channel,  to 
keep  them  would  be  impossible.  Sheer  necessity  forbade 
Philip  to  suffer  the  union  of  the  three  crowns  of  the  west 
on  the  head  of  a  French  King ;  and  the  French  marriage 
of  Mary  Stuart  pledged  him  to  oppose  her  pretensions  and 
support  Elizabeth's  throne.  For  a  moment  he  even 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1608.  303 

dreamed  of  meeting  the  union  of  France  and  Scotland  by 
that  union  of  England  with  Spain  which  had  been  seen 
under  Mary.  He  offered  Elizabeth  his  hand.  The  match 
was  a  more  natural  one  than  Philip's  union  with  her  sis- 
ter, for  the  young  King's  age  was  not  far  from  her  own. 
The  offer  however  was  courteously  put  aside,  for  Eliza- 
beth had  no  purpose  of  lending  England  to  the  ambftion 
of  Spain,  nor  was  it  possible  for  her  to  repeat  her  sister's 
unpopular  experiment.  But  Philip  remained  firm  in  his 
support  of  her  throne.  He  secured  for  her  the  allegiance  of 
the  Catholics  within  her  realm,  who  looked  to  him  as  their 
friend  while  they  distrusted  France  as  an  ally  of  heretics. 
His  envoys  supported  her  cause  in  the  negotiations  at 
Gateau  Cambresis;  he  suffered  her  to  borrow  money  and 
provide  herself  with  arms  in  his  provinces  of  the  Nether- 
lands. At  such  a  crisis  Elizabeth  could  not  afford  to 
alienate  Philip  by  changes  which  would  roughly  dispel  his 
hopes  of  retaining  her  within  the  bounds  of  Catholicism. 

Nor  is  there  any  sign  that  Elizabeth  had  resolved  on  a 
defiance  of  the  Papacy.  She  was  firm  indeed  to  assert  her 
father's  claim  of  supremacy  over  the  clergy  and  her  own 
title  to  the  throne.  But  the  difficulties  in  the  way  of  an 
accommodation  on  these  points  were  such  as  could  be  set- 
tled by  negotiation;  and,  acting  on  Cecil's  counsel,  Eliza- 
beth announced  her  accession  to  the  Pope.  The  announce- 
ment showed  her  purpose  of  making  no  violent  break  in 
the  relations  of  England  with  the  Papal  See.  But  be- 
tween Elizabeth  and  the  Papacy  lay  the  fatal  question  of 
the  Divorce.  To  acknowledge  the  young  Queen  was  not 
only  to  own  her  mother's  marriage,  but  to  cancel  the 
solemn  judgment  of  the  Holy  See  in  Catharine's  favor  and 
its  solemn  assertion  of  her  own  bastardy.  The  temper  of 
Paul  the  Fourth  took  fire  at  the  news.  He  reproached 
Elizabeth  with  her  presumption  in  ascending  the  throne, 
recalled  the  Papal  judgment  which  pronounced  her  illegiti- 
mate, and  summoned  her  to  submit  her  claims  to  his  tri- 
bunal. Much  of  this  indignation  was  no  doubt  merely 


304  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

diplomatic.  If  the  Pope  listened  to  the  claims  of  Mary 
Stuart,  which  were  urged  on  him  by  the  French  Court,  it 
was  probably  only  with  the  purpose  of  using  them  to  bring 
pressure  to  bear  on  Elizabeth  and  on  the  stubborn  country 
which  still  refused  to  restore  its  lands  to  the  Church  and 
to  make  the  complete  submission  which  Paul  demanded. 
But  Cecil  and  the  Queen  knew  that,  even  had  they  been 
willing  to  pay  such  a  price  for  the  crown,  it  was  beyond 
their  power  to  bring  England  to  pay  it.  The  form  too  in 
which  Paul  had  couched  his  answer  admitted  of  no  com- 
promise. The  summons  to  submit  the  Queen's  claim  of 
succession  to  the  judgment  of  Rome  produced  its  old  effect. 
Elizabeth  was  driven,  as  Henry  had  been  driven,  to  assert 
the  right  of  the  nation  to  decide  on  questions  which  af- 
fected its  very  life.  A  Parliament  which  met  in  January, 
1559,  acknowledged  the  legitimacy  of  Elizabeth  and  her 
title  to  the  crown. 

Such  an  acknowledgment  in  the  teeth  of  the  Papal  re- 
pudiation of  Anne  Boleyn's  marriage  carried  with  it  a  re- 
pudiation of  the  supremacy  of  the  Papacy.  It  was  in  vain 
that  the  clergy  in  convocation  unanimously  adopted  five 
articles  which  affirmed  their  faith  in  transubstantiation, 
their  acceptance  of  the  supreme  authority  of  the  Popes  as 
"Christ's  vicars  and  supreme  rulers  of  the  Church,"  and 
their  resolve  "  that  the  authority  in  all  matters  of  faith 
and  discipline  belongs  and  ought  to  belong  only  to  the  pas- 
tors of  the  Church,  and  not  to  laymen."  It  was  in  vain 
that  the  bishops  unanimously  opposed  the  Bill  for  restor- 
ing the  royal  supremacy  when  it  was  brought  before  the 
Lords.  The  "  ancient  jurisdiction  of  the  Crown  over  the 
Estate  ecclesiastical  and  spiritual"  was  restored ;  the  Acts 
which  under  Mary  re-established  the  independent  jurisdic- 
tion and  legislation  of  the  Church  were  .repealed ;  and  the 
clergy  were  called  on  to  swear  to  the  supremacy  of  the 
Crown  and  to  abjure  ah1  foreign  authority  and  jurisdiction. 
Further  Elizabeth  had  no  personal  wish  to  go.  A  third 
of  the  Council  and  at  least  two-thirds  of  the  people  were  as 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  305 

opposed  to  any  radical  changes  in  religion  as  the  Queen. 
Among  the  gentry  the  older  and  wealthier  were  on  the 
conservative  side,  and  only  the  younger  and  meaner  on  the 
other.  In  the  Parliament  itself  Sir  Thomas  White  pro- 
tested that  "  it  was  unjust  that  a  religion  begun  in  such  a 
miraculous  way  and  established  by  such  grave  men  should 
be  abolished  by  a  set  of  beardless  boys. "  Yet  even  this 
"beardless"  parliament  had  shown  a  strong  conservatism. 
The  Bill  which  re-established  the  royal  supremacy  met 
with  violent  opposition  in  the  Commons,  and  only  passed 
through  Cecil's  adroit  manoeuvring. 

But  the  steps  which  Elizabeth  had  taken  made  it  neces- 
sary to  go  further.  If  the  Protestants  were  the  less  nu- 
merous, they  were  the  abler  and  the  more  vigorous  party, 
and  the  break  with  Rome  threw  Elizabeth,  whether  she 
would  or  no,  on  their  support.  It  was  a  support  that  could 
only  be  bought  by  theological  concessions,  and  above  all 
by  the  surrender  of  the  Mass ;  for  to  every  Protestant  the 
Mass  was  identified  with  the  fires  of  Smithfield,  while  the 
Prayer-book  which  it  had  displaced  was  hallowed  by  the 
memories  of  the  Martyrs.  The  pressure  of  the  reforming 
party  indeed  would  have  been  fruitless  had  the  Queen  still 
been  hampered  by  danger  from  France.  Fortunately  for 
their  cause  the  treaty  of  Cateau  Cambresis  at  this  juncture 
freed  Elizabeth's  hands.  By  this  treaty,  which  was  prac- 
tically concluded  in  March,  1559,  Calais  was  left  in  French 
holding  on  the  illusory  pledge  of  its  restoration  to  England 
eight  years  later ;  but  peace  was  secured  and  the  danger  of 
a  war  of  succession,  in  which  Mary  Stuart  would  be 
backed  by  the  arms  of  France,  for  a  while  averted.  Se- 
cure from  without,  Elizabeth  could  venture  to  buy  the  sup- 
port of  the  Protestants  within  her  realm  by  the  restoration 
of  the  English  Prayer-book.  Such  a  measure  was  far  in- 
deed from  being  meant  as  an  open  break  with  Catholicism. 
The  use  of  the  vulgar  tongue  in  public  worship  was  still 
popular  with  a  large  part  of  the  Catholic  world ;  and  the 
Queen  did  her  best  by  the  alterations  she  made  in  Ed- 


306  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VL 

•ward's  Prayer-book  to  strip  it  of  its  more  Protestant  tone. 
To  the  bulk  of  the  people  the  book  must  have  seemed 
merely  a  rendering  of  the  old  service  in  their  own  tongue. 
As  the  English  Catholics  afterward  represented  at  Rome 
when  excusing  their  own  use  of  it,  the  Prayer-book  "  con- 
tained neither  impiety  nor  false  doctrine;  its  prayers  were 
those  of  the  Catholic  Church,  altered  only  so  far  as  to  omit 
the  merits  and  intercession  of  the  saints."  On  such  con- 
cession as  this  the  Queen  felt  it  safe  to  venture  in  spite  of 
the  stubborn  opposition  of  the  spiritual  estate.  She  or- 
dered a  disputation  to  be  held  in  Westminster  Abbey  be- 
fore the  Houses  on  the  question,  and  when  the  disputation 
ended  in  the  refusal  of  the  bishops  to  proceed  an  Act  of 
Uniformity,  which  was  passed  in  spite  of  their  strenuous 
opposition,  restored  at  the  close  of  April  the  last  Prayer- 
book  of  Edward,  and  enforced  its  use  on  the  clergy  on  pain 
of  deprivation. 

At  Rome  the  news  of  these  changes  stirred  a  fiercer 
wrath  in  Paul  the  Fourth,  and  his  threats  of  excommuni- 
cation were  only  held  in  check  by  the  protests  of  Philip. 
The  policy  of  the  Spanish  King  still  bound  him  to  Eliza- 
beth's cause,  for  the  claims  of  Mary  Stuart  h#d  been  re- 
served in  the  treaty  of  Gateau  Cambresis,  and  the  refusal 
of  France  to  abandon  them  held  Spain  to  its  alliance  with 
the  Queen.  Vexed  as  he  was  at  the  news  of  the  Acts 
which  re-established  the  supremacy,  Philip  ordered  his 
ambassador  to  assure  Elizabeth  he  was  as  sure  a  friend  as 
ever,  and  to  soothe  the  resentment  of  the  English  Catholics 
if  it  threatened  to  break  out  into  revolt.  He  showed  the 
same  temper  in  his  protest  against  action  at  Rome.  Paul 
had  however  resolved  to  carry  out  his  threats  when  his 
death  and  the  interregnum  which  followed  gave  Elizabeth 
a  fresh  respite.  His  successor,  Pius  the  Fourth,  was  of 
milder  temper  and  leaned  rather  to  a  policy  of  conciliation. 
Decisive  indeed  as  the  Queen's  action  may  seem  in  modern 
eyes,  it  was  far  from  being  held  as  decisive  at  the  time. 
The  Act  of  Supremacy  might  be  regarded  as  having  been 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  307 

forced  upon  Elizabeth  by  Paul's  repudiation  of  her  title 
to  the  crown.  The  alterations  which  were  made  by  the 
Queen's  authority  in  the  Prayer-book  showed  a  wish  to 
conciliate  those  who  clung  to  the  older  faith.  It  was  clear 
that  Elizabeth  had  no  mind  merely  to  restore  the  system 
of  the  Protectorate.  She  set  up  again  the  royal  suprem- 
acy, but  she  dropped  the  words  "  Head  of  the  Church" 
from  the  royal  title.  The  forty-two  Articles  of  Protestant 
doctrine  which  Cranmer  had  drawn  up  were  left  in  abey- 
ance. If  the  Queen  had  had  her  will,  she  would  have  re- 
tained the  celibacy  of  the  clergy  and  restored  the  use  of 
crucifixes  in  the  churches. 

The  caution  and  hesitation  with  which  she  enforced  on 
the  clergy  the  oath  required  by  the  Act  of  Supremacy 
showed  Elizabeth's  wish  to  avoid  the  opening  of  a  relig- 
ious strife.  The  higher  dignitaries  indeed  were  unspar- 
ingly dealt  with.  The  bishops,  who  with  a  single  excep- 
tion refused  to  take  the  oath,  were  imprisoned  and  deprived. 
The  same  measure  was  dealt  out  to  most  of  the  archdea- 
cons and  deans.  But  with  the  mass  of  the  parish  priests 
a  very  different  course  was  taken.  The  Commissioners 
appointed  in  May,  1559,  were  found  to  be  too  zealous  in 
October,  and  several  of  the  clerical  members  were  replaced 
by  cooler  laymen.  The  great  bulk  of  the  clergy  seem 
neither  to  have  refused  nor  to  have  consented  to  the  oath, 
but  to  have  left  the  Commissioners'  summons  unheeded 
and  to  have  stayed  quietly  at  home.  Of  the  nine  thousand 
four  hundred  beneficed  clergy  only  a  tenth  presented  them- 
selves before  the  Commissioners.  Of  those  who  attended 
and  refused  the  oath  a  hundred  and  eighty-nine  were  de- 
prived, but  many  of  the  most  prominent  went  unharmed. 
At  Winchester,  though  the  dean  and  canons  of  the  cathe- 
dral, the  warden  and  fellows  of  the  college,  and  the  master 
of  St.  Cross,  refused  the  oath,  only  four  of  these  appear  in 
the  list  of  deprivations.  Even  the  few  who  suffered  proved 
too  many  for  the  purpose  of  the  Queen.  In  the  more  re- 
mote parts  of  the  kingdom  the  proceedings  of  the  visitors 


308  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

threatened  to  wake  the  religious  strife  which  she  was  en- 
deavoring to  lull  to  sleep.  On  the  northern  border,  where 
the  great  nobles,  Lord  Dacres  and  the  Earls  of  Cumber- 
land and  Westmoreland,  were  zealous  Catholics,  and  re- 
fused tq  let  the  bishop  "meddle  with  them,"  the  clergy- 
held  stubbornly  aloof.  At  Durham  a  parson  was  able  to 
protest  without  danger  that  the  Pope  alone  had  power  in 
spiritual  matters.  In  Hereford  the  town  turned  out  to  re- 
ceive in  triumph  a  party  of  priests  from  the  west  who  had 
refused  the  oath.  The  University  of  Oxford  took  refuge 
in  sullen  opposition.  In  spite  of  pressure  from  the  Protes- 
tant prelates,  who  occupied  the  sees  vacated  by  the  de- 
prived bishops,  Elizabeth  was  firm  in  her  policy  of  pa- 
tience, and  in  December  she  ordered  the  Commissioners 
In  both  provinces  to  suspend  their  proceedings. 

In  part  indeed  of  her  effort  she  was  foiled  by  the  bitter- 
ness of  the  reformers.  The  London  mob  tore  down  the 
crosses  in  the  streets.  Her  attempt  to  retain  the  crucifix, 
or  to  enforce  the  celibacy  of  the  priesthood  fell  dead  before 
the  opposition  of  the  Protestant  clergy.  But  to  the  mass 
of  the  nation  the  compromise  of  Elizabeth  seems  to  have 
been  fairly  acceptable.  They  saw  but  little  change.  Their 
old  vicar  or  rector  in  almost  every  case  remained  in  his 
parsonage  and  ministered  in  his  church.  The  new  Prayer- 
book  was  for  the  most  part  an  English  rendering  of  the  old 
service.  Even  the  more  zealous  adherents  of  Catholicism 
held  as  yet  that  in  complying  with  the  order  for  attendance 
at  public  worship  "  there  could  be  nothing  positively  un- 
lawful." Where  party  feeling  ran  high  indeed  the  matter 
was  sometimes  settled  by  a  compromise.  A  priest  would 
celebrate  mass  at  his  parsonage  for  the  more  rigid  Catho- 
lics, and  administer  the  new  communion  in  church  to  the 
more  rigid  Protestants.  Sometimes  both  parties  knelt 
together  at  the  same  altar-rails,  the  one  to  receive  hosts 
consecrated  by  the  priest  at  home  after  the  old  usage,  the 
other  wafers  consecrated  in  Church  after  the  new.  In 
many  parishes  of  the  north  no  change  of  service  was  made 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  309 

at  all.  Even  where  priest  and  people  conformed  it  was 
often  with  a  secret  belief  that  better  times  were  soon  to 
bring  back  the  older  observances.  As  late  as  1569  some 
of  the  chief  parishes  in  Sussex  were  still  merely  bending 
to  the  storm  of  heresy.  "  In  the  church  of  Arundel  certain 
altars  do  stand  yet,  to  the  offence  of  the  godly,  which 
murmur  and  speak  much  against  the  same.  In  the  town 
of  Battle  when  a  preacher  doth  come  and  speak  anything 
against  the  Pope's  doctrine  they  will  not  abide  but  get 
them  out  of  the  church.  They  have  yet  in  the  diocese  in 
many  places  thereof  images  hidden  and  other  popish  orna- 
ments ready  to  set  up  the  mass  again  within  twenty -four 
hours  warning.  In  many  places  they  keep  yet  their 
chalices,  looking  to  have  mass  again."  Nor  was  there 
much  new  teaching  as  yet  to  stir  up  strife  in  those  who 
clung  to  the  older  faith.  Elizabeth  had  no  mind  for  con- 
troversies which  would  set  her  people  by  the  ears.  "  In 
many  churches  they  have  no  sermons,  not  one  in  seven 
years,  and  some  not  one  in  twelve."  The  older  priests  of 
Mary's  days  held  their  peace.  The  Protestant  preachers 
were  few  and  hampered  by  the  exaction  of  licenses.  In 
many  cases  churches  had  "neither  parson,  vicar,  nor 
curate,  but  a  sorry  reader."  Even  where  the  new  clergy 
were  of  higher  intellectual  stamp  they  were  often  un- 
popular. Many  of  those  who  were  set  in  the  place  of  the 
displaced  clergy  roused  disgust  by  their  violence  and  greed. 
Chapters  plundered  their  own  estates  by  leases  and  fines 
and  by  felling  timber.  The  marriages  of  the  clergy  became 
a  scandal,  which  was  increased  when  the  gorgeous  vest- 
ments of  the  old  worship  were  cut  up  into  gowns  and  bod- 
ices for  the  priests'  wives.  The  new  services  sometimes 
turned  into  scenes  of  utter  disorder  where  the  ministers 
wore  what  dress  they  pleased  and  the  communicant  stood 
or  sat  as  he  liked ;  while  the  old  altars  were  broken  down 
and  the  communion-table  was  often  a  bare  board  upon 
trestles.  Only  in  a  few  places  where  the  more  zealous  of 
the  reformers  had  settled  was  there  any  religious  instruc- 


310  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

tion.  "In  many  places,"  it  was  reported  after  ten  years 
of  the  Queen's  rule,  "  the  people  cannot  yet  say  their  com- 
mandments, and  in  some  not  the  articles  of  their  belief. 
Naturally  enough,  the  bulk  of  Englishmen  were  found  to 
be  "  utterly  devoid  of  religion,"  and  came  to  church  "  as  to 
a  May  game." 

To  modern  eyes  the  Church  under  Elizabeth  would  seem 
little  better  than  a  religious  chaos.  But  England  was 
fairly  used  to  religious  confusion,  for  the  whole  machinery 
of  English  religion  had  been  thrown  out  of  gear  by  the 
rapid  and  radical  changes  of  the  last  two  reigns.  And  to 
the  Queen's  mind  a  religious  chaos  was  a  far  less  difficulty 
than  a  parting  of  the  nation  into  two  warring  Churches 
which  would  have  been  brought  about  by  a  more  rigorous 
policy.  She  trusted  to  time  to  bring  about  greater  order ; 
and  she  found  in  Matthew  Parker,  whom  Pole's  death  at 
the  moment  of  her  accession  enabled  her  to  raise  to  the  see 
of  Canterbury,  an  agent  in  the  reorganization  of  the  Church 
whose  patience  and  moderation  were  akin  to  her  own.  To 
the  difficulties  which  Parker  found  indeed  in  the  temper  of 
the  reformers  and  their  opponents  new  difficulties  were 
sometimes  added  by  the  freaks  of  the  Queen  herself.  If 
she  had  no  convictions,  she  had  tastes ;  and  her  taste  re- 
volted from  the  bareness  of  Protestant  ritual  and  above  all 
from  the  marriage  of  priests.  "Leave  that  alone,"  she 
shouted  to  Dean  Nowell  from  the  royal  closet  as  he  de- 
nounced the  use  of  images — "  stick  to  your  text,  Master 
Dean,  leave  that  alone!"  When  Parker  was  firm  in  re- 
sisting the  introduction  of  the  crucifix  or  of  celibacy,  Eliza- 
beth showed  her  resentment  by  an  insult  to  his  wife.  Mar- 
ried ladies  were  addressed  at  this  time  as  "Madam,"  un- 
married ladies  as  "  Mistress ;"  but  the  marriage  of  the  clergy 
was  still  unsanctioned  by  law,  for  Elizabeth  had  refused 
to  revive  the  statute  of  Edward  by  which  it  was  allowed, 
and  the  position  of  a  priest's  wife  was  legally  a  very  doubt- 
ful one.  When  Mrs.  Parker  therefore  advanced  at  the 
close  of  a  sumptuous  entertainment  at  Lambeth  to  take 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  311 

leave  of  the  Queen,  Elizabeth  feigned  a  momentary  hesita- 
tion. "Madam,"  she  said  at  last,  "I  may  not  call  you, 
and  Mistress  I  am  loath  to  call  you ;  however,  I  thank  you 
for  your  good  cheer."  But  freaks  of  this  sort  had  little 
weight  beside  the  steady  support  which  the  Queen  gave 
to  the  Primate  in  his  work  of  order.  The  vacant  sees  were 
filled  with  men  from  among  the  exiles,  for  the  most  part 
learned  and  able,  though  far  more  Protestant  than  the 
bulk  of  their  flocks;  the  plunder  of  the  Church  by  the 
nobles  was  checked;  and  at  the  close  of  1559  England 
seemed  to  settle  quietly  down  in  a  religious  peace. 

But  cautious  as  had  been  Elizabeth's  movements  and 
skilfully  as  she  had  hidden  the  real  drift  of  her  measures 
from  the  bulk  of  the  people,  the  religion  of  England  was 
changed.  The  old  service  was  gone.  The  old  bishops 
were  gone.  The  royal  supremacy  was  again  restored. 
.All  connection  with  Rome  was  again  broken.  The  repudi- 
ation of  the  Papacy  and  the  restoration  of  the  Prayer-book 
in  the  teeth  of  the  unanimous  opposition  of  the  priest- 
hood had  established  the  great  principle  of  the  Reforma- 
tion, that  the  form  of  a  nation's  faith  should  be  determined 
not  by  the  clergy  but  by  the  nation  itself.  Different  there- 
fore as  was  the  temper  of  the  government,  the  religious  at- 
titude of  England  was  once  more  what  it  had  been  under 
the  Protectorate.  At  the  most  critical  moment  of  the  strife 
between  the  new  religion  and  the  old  England  had  ranged 
itself  on  the  side  of  Protestantism.  It  was  only  the  later 
history  of  Elizabeth's  reign  which  was  to  reveal  or  what 
mighty  import  this  Protestantism  of  Lngland  was  to  prove. 
Had  England  remained  Catholic  the  freedom  of  the  Dutch 
Republic  would  have  been  impossible.  No  Henry  the 
Fourth  would  have  reigned  in  France  to  save  French 
Protestantism  by  the  Edict  of  Nantes.  No  struggle  over 
far-off  seas  would  have  broken  the  power  of  Spain  and 
baffled  the  hopes  which  the  House  of  Austria  cherished  of 
whining  a  mastery  over  the  western  world.  Nor  could 

Calvinism  have  found  a  home  across  the  northern  border. 

ii  VOL.  2 


312  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

The  first  result  of  the  religious  change  in  England  was  to 
give  a  new  impulse  to  the  religious  revolution  in  Scotland. 
In  the  midst  of  anxieties  at  home  Elizabeth  had  been 
keenly  watching  the  fortunes  of  the  north.  We  have  seen 
how  the  policy  of  Mary  of  Guise  had  given  life  and  force 
to  the  Scottish  Reformation.  Not  only  had  the  Regent 
given  shelter  to  the  exiled  Protestants  and  looked  on  at  the 
diffusion  of  the  new  doctrines,  but  her  "  fair  words"  had 
raised  hopes  that  the  government  itself  would  join  the 
ranks  of  the  reformers.  Mary  of  Guise  had  looked  on  the 
religious  movement  in  a  purely  political  light.  It  was  as 
enemies  of  Mary  Tudor  that  she  gave  shelter  to  the  exiles, 
and  it  was  to  avoid  a  national  strife  which  would  have  left 
Scotland  open  to  English  attack  in  the  war  which  closed 
Mary's  reign  that  the  Regent  gave  "  fair  words"  to  the 
preachers.  But  with  the  first  Covenant,  with  the  appear- 
ance of  the  Lords  of  the  Congregation  in  an  avowed  league 
in  the  heart  of  the  land,  with  their  rejection  of  the  state 
worship  and  their  resolve  to  enforce  a  change  of  religion, 
her  attitude  suddenly  altered.  To  the  Regent  the  new  re- 
ligion was  henceforth  but  a  garb  under  which  the  old 
quarrel  of  the  nobles  was  breaking  out  anew  against  the 
Crown.  Smooth  as  were  her  words,  men  knew  that  Mary 
of  Guise  was  resolute  to  withstand  religious  change.  But 
Elizabeth's  elevation  to  the  throne  gave  a  new  fire  to  the 
reformers.  Conservative  as  her  earlier  policy  seemed,  the 
instinct  of  the  Protestants  told  them  that  the  new  queen's 
accession  was  a  triumph  for  Protestantism.  The  Lords  at 
once  demanded  that  all  bishops  should  be  chosen  by  the 
nobles  and  gentry,  each  priest  by  his  parish,  and  that  divine 
service  should  be  henceforth  in  the  vulgar  tongue.  These 
demands  were  rejected  by  the  bishops,  while  the  royal 
court  in  May  1559  summoned  the  preachers  to  its  bar  and 
on  their  refusal  to  appear  condemned  them  to  banishment 
as  rebels.  The  sentence  was  a  signal  for  open  strife.  The 
Protestants,  whose  strength  as  yet  lay  mainly  in  Fife,  had 
gathered  in  great  numbers  at  Perth,  and  the  news  stirred 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  313 

them  to  an  outbreak  of  fury.  The  images  were  torn  down 
from  the  churches,  the  monasteries  of  the  town  were  sacked 
and  demolished.  The  riot  at  Perth  was  followed  by  a 
general  rising.  The  work  of  destruction  went  on  along 
the  east  coast  and  through  the  Lowlands,  while  the  "  Con- 
gregation" sprang  up  everywhere  in  its  train.  The  Mass 
came  to  an  end.  The  Prayer-book  of  Edward  was  heard 
in  the  churches.  The  Lords  occupied  the  capital  and  found 
its  burghers  as  zealous  in  the  cause  of  reformation  as 
themselves.  Throughout  all  these  movements  the  Lords 
had  been  in  communication  with  England,  for  the  old 
jealousy  of  English  annexation  was  now  lost  in  a  jealousy 
of  French  conquest.  Their  jealousy  had  solid  grounds. 
The  marriage  of  Mary  Stuart  with  the  Dauphin  of  France 
had  been  celebrated  in  April  1558  and  three  days  before  the 
wedding  the  girl-queen  had  been  brought  to  convey  her 
kingdom  away  by  deed  to  the  House  of  Valois.  The  deed 
was  kept  secret ;  but  Mary's  demand  of  the  crown  matri- 
monial for  her  husband  roused  suspicions.  It  was  known 
that  the  government  of  Scotland  was  discussed  at  the 
French  council-board,  and  whispers  came  of  a  suggestion 
that  the  kingdom  should  be  turned  into  an  appanage  for 
a  younger  son  of  the  French  King.  Meanwhile  French 
money  was  sent  to  the  Regent,  a  body  of  French  troops 
served  as  her  body-guard,  and  on  the  advance  of  the  Lords 
in  arms  the  French  Court  promised  her  the  support  of  a 
larger  army. 

Against  these  schemes  of  the  French  Court  the  Scotch 
;  Lords  saw  no  aid  save  in  Elizabeth.  Their  aim  was  to 
drive  the  Frenchmen  out  of  Scotland ;  and  this  could  only 
be  done  by  help  both  in  money  and  men  from  England. 
Nor  was  the  English  Council  slow  to  promise  help.  To 
Elizabeth  indeed  the  need  of  supporting  rebels  against  their 
sovereign  was  a  bitter  one.  The  need  of  establishing  a 
Calvinistic  Church  on  her  frontier  was  yet  bitterer.  It 
was  not  a  national  force  which  upheld  the  fabric  of  the 
monarchy,  as  it  had  been  built  up  by  the  Houses  of  York 


314  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

and  of  Tudor,  but  a  moral  force.  England  held  that  safety 
against  anarchy  within  and  against  attacks  on  the  national 
independence  from  without  was  to  be  found  in  the  Crown 
alone,  and  that  obedience  to  the  Crown  was  the  first  ele- 
ment of  national  order  and  national  greatness.  In  their 
religious  reforms  the  Tudor  sovereigns  had  aimed  at  giving 
a  religious  sanction  to  the  power  which  sprang  from  this 
general  conviction,  and  at  hallowing  their  secular  suprem- 
acy by  blending  with  it  their  supremacy  over  the  Church. 
Against  such  a  theory,  either  of  Church  or  State,  Calvin- 
ism was  an  emphatic  protest,  and  in  aiding  Calvinism  to 
establish  itself  in  Scotland  the  Queen  felt  that  she  was  deal- 
ing a  heavy  blow  to  her  political  and  religious  system  at 
home.  But  struggle  as  she  might  against  the  necessity, 
she  had  no  choice  but  to  submit.  The  assumption  by 
Francis  and  Mary  of  the  style  of  King  and  Queen  of  Eng- 
land, the  express  reservation  of  this  claim,  even  in  the 
treaty  of  Cateau  Cambresis,  made  a  French  occupation  of 
Scotland  a  matter  of  life  and  death  to  the  kingdom  over 
the  border.  The  English  Council  believed  "  that  the  French 
mean,  after  their  forces  are  brought  into  Scotland,  first  to 
conquer  it, — which  will  be  neither  hard  nor  long — and 
next  that  they  and  the  Scots  will  invade  this  realm." 
They  were  soon  pressed  to  decide  on  their  course.  The 
Regent  used  her  money  to  good  purpose,  and  at  the  ap- 
proach of  her  forces  the  Lords  withdrew  from  Edinburgh 
to  the  west.  At  the  end  of  August  two  thousand  French 
soldiers  landed  at  Leith,  as  the  advance  guard  of  the 
promised  forces,  and  entrenched  themselves  strongly.  It 
was  in  vain  that  the  Lords  again  appeared  in  the  field,  de- 
manded the  withdrawal  of  the  foreigners,  and  threatened 
Mary  of  Guise  that  as  she  would  no  longer  hold  them  for 
her  counsellors  "  we  also  will  no  longer  acknowledge  you 
as  our  Regent."  They  were  ordered  to  disperse  as  traitors, 
beaten  off  from  the  fortifications  of  Leith,  and  attacked  by 
the  French  troops  in  Fife  itself. 

The  Lords  called  loudly  for  aid  from  the  English  Queen. 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  315 

To  give  such  assistance  would  have  seemed  impossible  but 
twelve  months  back.  But  the  appeal  of  the  Scots  found  a 
different  England  from  that  which  had  met  Elizabeth  on 
her  accession.  The  Queen's  diplomacy  had  gained  her  a 
year,  and  her  matchless  activity  had  used  the  year  to  good 
purpose.  Order  was  restored  throughout  England,  the 
Church  was  reorganized,  the  debts  of  the  Crown  were  in 
part  paid  off,  the  treasury  was  recruited,  a  navy  created, 
and  a  force  made  ready  for  action  in  the  north.  Neither 
religiously  nor  politically  indeed  had  Elizabeth  any  sym- 
pathy with  the  Scotch  Lords.  Knox  was  to  her  simply  a 
firebrand  of  rebellion;  her  political  instinct  shrank  from 
the  Scotch  Calvinism  with  its  protest  against  the  whole 
English  system  of  government,  whether  in  Church  or 
State ;  and  as  a  Queen  she  hated  revolt.  But  the  danger 
forced  her  hand.  Elizabeth  was  ready  to  act,  and  to  act 
even  in  the  defiance  of  France.  As  yet  she  stood  almost 
alone  in  her  self-reliance.  Spain  believed  her  ruin  to  be 
certain.  Her  challenge  would  bring  war  with  France,  and 
in  a  war  with  France  the  Spanish  statesmen  held" that  only 
their  master's  intervention  could  save  her.  "  For  our  own 
sake,"  said  one  of  Philip's  ministers,  "we  must  take  as 
much  care  of  England  as  of  the  Low  Countries."  But 
that  such  a  care  would  be  needed  Grenville  never  doubted ; 
and  Philip's  councillors  solemnly  debated  whether  it  might 
not  be  well  to  avoid  the  risk  of  a  European  struggle  by 
landing  the  six  thousand  men  whom  Philip  was  now  with- 
drawing from  the  Netherlands  on  the  English  shore,  and 
coercing  Elizabeth  into  quietness.  France  meanwhile 
despised  her  chances.  Her  very  Council  was  in  despair. 
The  one  minister  in  whom  she  dared  to  confide  throughout 
these  Scotch  negotiations  was  Cecil,  the  youngest  and 
boldest  of  her  advisers,  and  even  Cecil  trembled  for  her 
success.  The  Duke  of  Norfolk  refused  at  first  to  take  com- 
mand of  the  force  destined  as  he  held  for  a  desperate  enter- 
prise. Arundel,  the  leading  peer  among  the  Catholics, 
denounced  the  supporters  of  a  Scottish  war  as  traitors.  But 


316  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

lies  and  hesitation  were  no  sooner  put  aside  than  the 
Queen's  vigor  and  tenacity  came  fairly  into  play.  In 
January,  1560,  at  a  moment  when  D'Oysel,  the  French 
commander,  was  on  the  point  of  crushing  the  Lords  of  the 
Congregation,  an  English  fleet  appeared  suddenly  in  the 
Forth  and  forced  the  Regent's  army  to  fall  back  upon 
Leith. 

Here  however  it  again  made  an  easy  stand  against  the 
Protestant  attacks,  and  at  the  close  of  February  the  Queen 
was  driven  to  make  a  formal  treaty  with  the  Lords  by 
which  she  promised  to  assist  them  in  the  expulsion  of  the 
strangers.  The  treaty  was  a  bold  defiance  of  the  power 
from  whom  Elizabeth  had  been  glad  to  buy  peace  only  a 
year  before,  even  by  the  sacrifice  of  Calais.  But  the 
Queen  had  little  fear  of  a  counter-blow  from  France.  The 
Reformation  was  fighting  for  her  on  the  one  side  of  the 
sea  as  on  the  other.  From  the  outset  of  her  reign  the  rapid 
growth  of  the  Huguenots  in  France  had  been  threatening 
a  strife  between  the  old  religion  and  the  new.  It  was  to 
gird  himself  for  such  a  struggle  that  Henry  the  Second 
concluded  the  treaty  of  Gateau  Cambresis;  and  though 
Henry's  projects  were  foiled  by  his  death,  the  Duke  of 
Guise,  who  ruled  his  successor,  Francis  the  Second,  pressed 
on  yet  more  bitterly  the  work  of  persecution.  It  was  be- 
lieved that  he  had  sworn  to  exterminate  "  those  of  the  re- 
ligion." But  the  Huguenots  were  in  no  mood  to  bear  ex- 
termination. Their  Protestantism,  like  that  of  the  Scots, 
was  the  Protestantism  of  Calvin.  As  they  grew  in  num- 
bers, their  churches  formed  themselves  on  the  model  of 
Geneva,  and  furnished  in  their  synods  and  assemblies  a 
political  as  well  as  a  religious  organization ;  while  the  doc- 
trine of  resistance  even  to  kings,  if  kings  showed  them- 
selves enemies  to  God,  found  ready  hearers,  whether  among 
the  turbulent  French  noblesse,  or  among  the  traders  of  the 
towns  who  were  stirred  to  new  dreams  of  constitutional 
freedom.  Theories  of  liberty  or  of  resistance  to  the  crown 
were  as  abhorrent  to  Elizabeth  as  to  the  Guises,  but  again 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  317 

necessity  swept  her  into  the  current  of  Calvinism.  She 
was  forced  to  seize  on  the  religious  disaffection  of  France 
as  a  check  on  the  dreams  of  aggression  which  Francis  and 
Mary  had  shown  in  assuming  the  style  of  English  Sover- 
eigns. The  English  ambassador,  Throckmorton,  fed  the 
alarms  of  the  Huguenots  and  pressed  them  to  take  up  arms. 
It  is  probable  that  the  Huguenot  plot  which  broke  out  in 
the  March  of  1560  in  an  attempt  to  surprise  the  French 
Court  at  Amboise  was  known  beforehand  by  Cecil ;  and, 
though  the  conspiracy  was  ruthlessly  suppressed,  the  Queen 
drew  fresh  courage  from  a  sense  that  the  Guises  had  hence- 
forth work  for  their  troops  at  home. 

At  the  end  of  March  therefore  Lord  Grey  pushed  ovei 
the  border  with  8,000  men  to  join  the  Lords  of  the  Con- 
gregation in  the  siege  of  Leith.  The  Scots  gave  little  aid ; 
and  an  assault  on  the  town  signally  failed.  Philip  too  in 
a  sudden  jealousy  of  Elizabeth's  growing  strength  de- 
manded the  abandonment  of  the  enterprise,  and  offered  to 
warrant  England  against  any  attack  from  the  north  if  its 
forces  were  withdrawn.  But  eager  as  Elizabeth  was  to 
preserve  Philip's  alliance,  she  preferred  to  be  her  own 
security.  She  knew  that  the  Spanish  King  could  not 
abandon  her  while  Mary  Stuart  was  Queen  of  France,  and 
that  at  the  moment  of  his  remonstrances  Philip  was  menac- 
ing the  Guises  with  war  if  they  carried  out  their  project 
of  bringing  about  Catholic  rising  by  a  descent  on  the 
English  coast.  Nor  were  the  threats  of  the  French  Court 
more  formidable.  The  bloody  repression  of  the  conspiracy 
of  Amboise  had  only  fired  the  temper  of  the  Huguenots ; 
southern  and  western  France  were  on  the  verge  of  revolt; 
the  House  of  Bourbon  had  adopted  the  reformed  faith,  and 
put  itself  at  the  head  of  the  Protestant  movement.  In  the 
face  of  dangers  such  as  these  the  Guises  could  send  to 
Leith  neither  money  nor  men.  Elizabeth  therefore  re- 
mained immovable  while  famine  did  its  work  on  the  town. 
At  the  crisis  of  the  siege  the  death  of  Mary  of  Guise  threw 
the  direct  rule  over  Scotland  into  the  hands  of  Francis  and 


318  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

Mary  Stuart;  and  the  exhaustion  of  the  garrison  forced 
the  two  sovereigns  to  purchase  its  liberation  by  two  treaties 
which  their  envoys  concluded  at  Edinburgh  in  June  1560. 
That  with  the  Scotch  pledged  them  to  withdraw  forever 
the  French  from  the  realm,  and  left  the  government  of 
Scotland  to  a  Council  of  the  Lords.  The  treaty  with  Eng- 
land was  a  more  difficult  matter.  Francis  and  Mary  had 
forbidden  their  envoys  to  sign  any  engagement  with  Eliza- 
beth as  to  the  Scottish  realm,  or  to  consent  to  any  aban- 
donment of  their  claims  on  the  royal  style  of  England.  It 
was  only  after  long  debate  that  Cecil  wrested  from  them 
the  acknowledgment  that  the  realms  of  England  and  Ire- 
land of  right  appertained  to  Elizabeth,  and  a  vague  clause 
by  which  the  French  sovereigns  promised  the  English 
Queen  that  they  would  fulfil  their  pledges  to  the  Scots. 

Stubborn  however  as  was  the  resistance  of  the  French 
envoys  the  signature  of  the  treaty  proclaimed  Elizabeth's 
success.  The  issue  of  the  Scotch  war  revealed  suddenly  to 
Europe  the  vigor  of  the  Queen  and  the  strength  of  her 
throne.  What  her  ability  really  was  no  one,  save  Cecil, 
had  as  yet  suspected.  There  was  little  indeed  in  her  out- 
ward demeanor  to  give  any  indication  of  her  greatness. 
To  the  world  about  her  the  temper  of  Elizabeth  recalled  in 
its  strange  contrasts  the  mixed  blood  within  her  veins. 
She  was  at  once  the  daughter  of  Henry  and  of  Anne 
Boleyn.  From  her  father  she  inherited  her  frank  and 
hearty  address,  her  love  of  popularity  and  of  free  inter- 
course with  the  people,  her  dauntless  courage  and  her 
amazing  self-confidenee.  Her  harsh,  manlike  voice,  her 
impetuous  will,  her  pride,  her  furious  outbursts  of  anger 
came  to  her  with  her  Tudor  blood.  She  rated  great  nobles 
as  if  they  were  schoolboys;  she  met  the  insolence  of  Lord 
Essex  with  a  box  on  the  ear ;  she  broke  now  and  then  into 
the  gravest  deliberations  to  swear  at  her  ministers  like  a 
fishwife.  Strangely  in  contrast  with  these  violent  outlines 
of  her  father's  temper  stood  the  sensuous,  self-indulgent 
nature  she  drew  from  Anne  Boleyn.  Splendor  and  pleasure 


CHAP.  8.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  319 

were  with  Elizabeth  the  very  air  she  breathed.  Her  de- 
light was  to  move  in  perpetual  progresses  from  caatle  to 
castle  through  a  series  of  gorgeous  pageants,  fanciful  and 
extravagant  as  a  caliph's  dream.  She  loved  gayety  and 
laughter  and  wit.  A  happy  retort  or  a  finished  compliment 
never  failed  to  win  her  favor.  She  hoarded  jewels.  Her 
dresses  were  innumerable.  Her  vanity  remained,  even  to 
old  age,  the  vanity  of  a  coquette  in  her  teens.  No  adula- 
tion was  too  fulsome  for  her,  no  flattery  of  her  beauty  too 
gross.  She  would  play  with  her  rings  that  her  courtiers 
might  note  the  delicacy  of  her  hands ;  or  dance  a  coranto 
that  an  ambassador,  hidden  dexterously  behind  a  curtain, 
might  report  her  sprightliness  to  his  master.  Her  levity, 
her  frivolous  laughter,  her  unwomanly  jests  gave  color  to 
a  thousand  scandals.  Her  character  in  fact,  like  her  por- 
traits, was  utterly  without  shade.  Of  womanly  reserve  or 
self-restraint  she  knew  nothing.  No  instinct  of  delicacy 
veiled  the  voluptuous  temper  which  broke  out  in  the  romps 
of  her  girlhood  and  showed  itself  almost  ostentatiously 
through  her  later  life.  Personal  beauty  in  a  man  was  a 
sure  passport  to  her  liking.  She  patted  handsome  young 
squires  on  the  neck  when  they  knelt  to  kiss  her  hand,  and 
fondled  her  "sweet  Robin,"  Lord  Leicester,  in  the  face  of 
the  Court. 

It  was  no  wonder  that  the  statesmen  whom  she  outwitted 
held  Elizabeth  to  be  little  more  than  a  frivolous  woman, 
or  that  Philip  of  Spain  wondered  how  "  a  wanton"  could 
hold  in  check  the  policy  of  the  Escurial.  But  the  Eliza- 
beth whom  they  saw  was  far  from  being  all  of  Elizabeth. 
Wilf ulness  and  triviality  played  over  the  surface  of  a  na- 
ture hard  as  steel,  a  temper  purely  intellectual,  the  very 
type  of  reason  untouched  by  imagination  or  passion. 
Luxurious  and  pleasure-loving  as  she  seemed,  the  young 
Queen  lived  simply  and  frugally,  and  she  worked  hard. 
Her  vanity  and  caprice  had  no  weight  whatever  with  her 
in  state  affairs.  The  coquette  of  the  presence-chamber  be- 
came the  coolest  and  hardest  of  politicians  at  the  council- 


320  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

board.  Fresh  from  the  flattery  of  her  courtiers,  she  would 
tolerate  no  flattery  in  the  closet ;  she  was  herself  plain  and 
downright  of  speech  with  her  counsellors,  and  she  looked 
for  a  corresponding  plainness  of  speech  in  return.  The 
very  choice  of  her  advisers  indeed  showed  Elizabeth's 
ability.  She  had  a  quick  eye  for  merit  of  any  sort,  and  a 
wonderful  power  of  enlisting  its  whole  energy  in  her  ser- 
vice. The  sagacity  which  chose  Cecil  and  Walsingham 
was  just  as  unerring  in  its  choice  of  the  meanest  of  her 
agents.  Her  success  indeed  in  securing  from  the  begin- 
ning of  her  reign  to  its  end,  with  the  single  exception  of 
Leicester,  precisely  the  right  men  for  the  work  she  set 
them  to  do  sprang  in  great  measure  from  the  noblest  char- 
acteristic of  her  intellect.  If  in  loftiness  of  aim  the  Queen's 
temper  fell  below  many  of  the  tempers  of  her  time,  in  the 
breadth  of  its  range,  in  the  universality  of  its  sympathy  it 
stood  far  above  them  all.  Elizabeth  could  talk  poetry  with 
Spenser  and  philosophy  with  Bruno;  she  could  discuss 
Euphuism  with  Lilly,  and  enjoy  the  chivalry  of  Essex ; 
she  could  turn  from  talk  of  the  last  fashions  to  pore  with 
Cecil  over  dispatches  and  treasury  books ;  she  could  pas? 
from  tracking  traitors  with  Walsingham  to  settle  points  of 
doctrine  with  Parker,  or  to  calculate  with  Frobisher  the 
chances  of  a  northwest  passage  to  the  Indies.  The  ver- 
satility and  many-sidedness  cf  her  mind  enabled  her  to 
understand  every  phase  of  the  intellectual  movement  about 
her,  and  to  fix  by  a  sort  of  instinct  era  its  higher  represen' 
tatives. 

It  was  only  on  its  intellectual  side  indeed  that  Elizabeth 
touched  the  England  of  her  day.  All  its  moral  aspects 
were  simply  dead  to  her.  It  was  a  time  when  men  were 
being  lifted  into  nobleness  by  the  new  moral  energy  which 
seemed  suddenly  to  pulse  through  the  whole  people,  when 
honor  and  enthusiasm  took  colors  of  poetic  beauty,  and  re- 
ligion became  a  chivalry.  But  the  finer  sentiments  of  the 
men  about  her  touched  Elizabeth  simply  as  the  fair  tints 
of  a  picture  would  have  touched  her.  She  made  hca 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  321 

market  with  equal  indifference  out  of  the  heroism  of 
William  of  Orange  or  the  bigotry  of  Philip.  The  noblest 
aims  and  lives  were  only  counters  on  her  board.  She  was 
the  one  soul  in  her  realm  whom  the  news  of  St.  Bartholo- 
mew stirred  to  no  thirst  for  vengeance ;  and  while  England 
was  thrilling  with  the  triumph  over  the  Armada,  its  Queen 
was  coolly  grumbling  over  the  cost,  and  making  her  profit 
out  of  the  spoiled  provisions  she  had  ordered  for  the  fleet 
that  saved  her.  No  womanly  sympathy  bound  her  even 
to  those  who  stood  closest  to  her  life.  She  loved  Leicester 
indeed ;  she  was  grateful  to  Cecil.  But  for  the  most  part 
she  was  deaf  to  the  voices  either  of  love  or  gratitude.  She 
accepted  such  services  as  were  never  rendered  to  any  other 
English  sovereign  without  a  thought  of  return.  Walsing- 
ham  spent  his  fortune  in  saving  her  life  and  her  throne, 
and  she  left  him  to  die  a  beggar.  But,  as  if  by  a  strange 
irony,  it  was  to  this  very  lack  of  womanly  sympathy  that 
she  owed  some  of  the  grandest  features  of  her  character. 
If  she  was  without  love  she  was  without  hate.  She  cher- 
ished no  petty  resentments ;  she  never  stooped  to  envy  or 
suspicion  of  the  men  who  served  her.  She  was  indifferent 
to  abuse.  Her  good  humor  was  never  ruffled  by  the 
charges  of  wantonness  and  cruelty  with  which  the  Jesuits 
filled  every  Court  in  Europe.  She  was  insensible  to  fear. 
Her  life  became  at  last  a  mark  for  assassin  after  assassin, 
but  the  thought  of  peril  was  the  thought  hardest  to  bring 
home  to  her.  Even  when  Catholic  plots  broke  out  in  her 
very  household  she  would  listen  to  no  proposals  for  the  re- 
moval of  Catholics  from  her  court. 

If  any  trace  of  her  sex  lingered  in  the  Queen's  actual 
statesmanship,  it  was  seen  in  the  simplicity  and  tenacity 
of  purpose  that  often  underlies  a  woman's  fluctuations  of 
feeling.  It  was  the  directness  and  steadiness  of  her  aims 
which  gave  her  her  marked  superiority  over  the  statesmen 
of  her  time.  No  nobler  group  of  ministers  ever  gathered 
round  a  council-board  than  those  who  gathered  round  the 
council-board  of  Elizabeth.  But  she  was  the  instrument 


322  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

of  none.  She  listened,  she  weighed,  she  used  or  put  by 
the  counsels  of  each  in  turn,  but  her  policy  as  a  whole  was 
her  own.  It  was  a  policy,  not  of  genius,  but  of  good  sense. 
Her  aims  were  simple  and  obvious :  to  preserve  her  throne, 
to  keep  England  out  of  war,  to  restore  civil  and  religious 
order.  Something  of  womanly  caution  and  timidity  per- 
haps backed  the  passionless  indifference  with  which  she 
set  aside  the  larger  schemes  of  ambition  which  were  ever 
opening  before  her  eyes.  In  later  days  she  was  resolute 
in  her  refusal  of  the'  Low  Countries.  She  rejected  with  a 
laugh  the  offers  of  the  Protestants  to  make  her  "  head  of 
the  religion"  and  "  mistress  of  the  seas. "  But  her  amaz- 
ing success  in  the  end  sprang  mainly  from  this  wise  limita- 
tion of  her  aims.  She  had  a  finer  sense  than  any  of  her 
counsellors  of  her  real  resources;  she  knew  instinctively 
how  far  she  could  go  and  what  she  could  do.  Her  cold, 
critical  intellect  was  never  swayed  by  enthusiasm  or  by 
panic  either  to  exaggerate  or  to  under-estimate  her  risks 
or  her  power.  Of  political  wisdom  indeed  in  its  larger 
and  more  generous  sense  Elizabeth  had  little  or  none ;  but 
her  political  tact  was  unerring.  She  seldom  saw  her  course 
at  a  glance,  but  she  played  with  a  hundred  courses,  fitfully 
and  discursively,  as  a  musician  runs  his  fingers  over  the 
keyboard,  till  she  hit  suddenly  upon  the  right  one.  Her 
nature  was  essentially  practical  and  of  the  present.  She 
distrusted  a  plan  in  fact  just  in  proportion  to  its  specula- 
tive range  or  its  outlook  into  the  future.  Her  notion  of 
statesmanship  lay  in  watching  how  things  turned  out 
around  her,  and  in  seizing  the  moment  for  making  the 
best  of  them. 

Such  a  policy  as  this,  limited,  practical,  tentative  as  it 
always  was,  had  little  of  grandeur  and  originality  about 
it;  it  was  apt  indeed  to  degenerate  into  mere  trickery  and 
finesse.  But  it  was  a  policy  suited  to  the  England  of  her 
day,  to  its  small  resources  and  the  transitional  character  of 
its  religious  and  political  belief,  and  it  was  eminently  suited 
to  Elizabeth's  peculiar  powers.  It  was  a  policy  of  detail, 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  323 

and  in  details  her  wonderful  readiness  and  ingenuity  found 
scope  for  their  exercise.  "  No  War,  my  Lords,"  the  Queen 
used  to  cry  imperiously  at  the  council-board,  "  No  War  1" 
but  her  hatred  of  war  sprang  not  so  much  from  aversion 
to  blood  or  to  expense,  real  as  was  her  aversion  to  both,  as 
from  the  fact  that  peace  left  the  field  open  to  the  diplomatic 
manoeuvres  and  intrigues  in  which  she  excelled.  Her 
delight  in  the  consciousness  of  her  ingenuity  broke  out  in 
a  thousand  puckish  freaks,  freaks  in  which  one  can  hardly 
see  any  purpose  beyond  the  purpose  of  sheer  mystification. 
She  revelled  in  "by-ways"  and  "crooked  ways."  She 
played  with  grave  cabinets  as  a  cat  plays  with  a  mouse, 
and  with  much  of  thA  same  feline  delight  in  the  mere  em- 
barrassment of  her  victims.  When  she  was  weary  of 
mystifying  foreign  statesmen  she  turned  to  find  fresh  sport 
in  mystifying  her  own  ministers.  Had  Elizabeth  written 
the  story  of  her  reign  she  would  have  prided  herself,  not 
on  the  triumph  of  England  or  the  ruin  of  Spain,  but  on 
the  skill  with  which  she  had  hoodwinked  and  outwitted 
every  statesman  in  Europe  during  fifty  years.  Nothing  is 
more  revolting,  but  nothing  is  more  characteristic  of  the 
Queen  than  her  shameless  mendacity.  It  was  an  age  of 
political  lying,  but  in  the  profusion  and  recklessness  of  her 
lies  Elizabeth  stood  without  a  peer  in  Christendom.  ^A 
falsehood  was  to  her  simply  an  intellectual  means  of  meet- 
ing a  difficulty ;  and  the  ease  with  which  she  asserted  or 
denied  whatever  suited  her  purpose  was  only  equalled  by 
the  cynical  indifference  with  which  she  met  the  exposure 
of  her  lies  as  soon  as  their  purpose  was  answered.  Her 
trickery  in  fact  had  its  political  value.  Ignoble  and  weari- 
some as  the  Queen's  diplomacy  seems  to  us  now,  tracking 
it  as  we  do  through  a  thousand  dispatches,  it  succeeded  in 
its  main  end,  for  it  gained  time,  and  every  year  that  was 
gained  doubled  Elizabeth's  strength.  She  made  as  dexter- 
ous a  use  of  the  foibles  of  her  temper.  Her  levity  carried 
her  gayly  over  moments  of  detection  and  embarrassment 
where  better  women  would  have  died  of  shame.  She 


324:  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

screened  her  tentative  and  hesitating  statesmanship  under 
the  natural  timidity  and  vacillation  of  her  sex.  She  turned 
her  very  luxury  and  sports  to  good  account.  There  were 
moments  of  grave  danger  in  her  reign  when  the  country 
remained  indifferent  to  its  perils,  as  it  saw  the  Queen  give 
her  days  to  hawking  and  hunting,  and  her  nights  to  danc- 
ing and  plays.  Her  vanity  and  affectation,  her  womanly 
fickleness  and  caprice,  all  had  their  part  in  the  diplomatic 
comedies  she  played  with  the  successive  candidates  for  her 
hand.  If  political  necessities  made  her  life  a  lonely  one, 
she  had  at  any  rate  the  satisfaction  of  averting  war  and 
conspiracies  by  love  sonnets  and  romantic  interviews,  or 
of  gaining  a  year  of  tranquillity  by  the  dexterous  spinning 
out  of  a  flirtation. 

As  we  track  Elizabeth  through  her  tortuous  mazes  of 
lying  and  intrigue,  the  sense  of  her  greatness  is  almost 
lost  in  a  sense  of  contempt.  But  wrapped  as  they  were  in 
a  cloud  of  mystery,  the  aims  of  her  policy  were  throughout 
temperate  and  simple,  and  they  were  pursued  with  a  rare 
tenacity.  The  sudden  acts  of  energy  which  from  time  to 
time  broke  her  habitual  hesitation  proved  that  it  was  no 
hesitation  of  weakness.  Elizabeth  could  wait  and  finesse; 
but  when  the  hour  was  come  she  could  strike,  and  strike 
hard.  Her  natural  temper  indeed  tended  to  a  rash  self- 
confidence  rather  than  to  self -distrust.  "  I  have  the  heart 
of  a  King,"  she  cried  at  a  moment  of  utter  peril,  and  it 
was  with  a  kingly  unconsciousness  of  the  dangers  about 
her  that  she  fronted  them  for  fifty  years.  She  had,  as 
strong  natures  always  have,  an  unbounded  confidence  in 
her  luck.  "Her  Majesty  counts  much  on  Fortune," 
Walsingham  wrote  bitterly;  "  I  wish  she  would  trust  more 
in  Almighty  God."  The  diplomatists  who  censured  at 
one  moment  her  irresolution,  her  delay,  her  changes  of 
front,  censure  at  the  next  her  "obstinacy,"  her  iron  will, 
her  defiance  of  what  seemed  to  them  inevitable  ruin.  "  This 
woman,"  Philip's  envoy  wrote  after  a  wasted  remon- 
strance, "  this  woman  is  possessed  by  a  hundred  thousand 


CHAP.  8.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  325 

devils."  To  her  own  subjects,  who  knew  nothing  of  her 
manoeuvres  and  flirtations,  of  her  "  by-ways"  and  "  crooked 
ways,"  she  seemed  the  embodiment  of  dauntless  resolution. 
Brave  as  they  were,  the  men  who  swept  the  Spanish  Main 
or  glided  between  the  icebergs  of  Baffin's  Bay  never 
doubted  that  the  palm  of  bravery  lay  with  their  Queen. 

It  was  this  dauntless  courage  which  backed  Elizabeth's 
good  luck  in  the  Scottish  war.  The  issue  of  the  war 
wholly  changed  her  position  at  home  and  abroad.  Not 
only  had  she  liberated  herself  from  the  control  of  Philip 
and  successfully  defied  the  threats  of  the  Guises,  but  at  a 
single  blow  she  had  freed  England  from  what  had  been  its 
sorest  danger  for  two  hundred  years.  She  had  broken  the 
dependence  of  Scotland  upon  France.  That  perpetual 
peace  between  England  and  the  Scots  which  the  policy  of 
the  Tudors  had  steadily  aimed  at  was  at  last  sworn  in  the 
Treaty  of  Edinburgh.  If  the  Queen  had  not  bound  to  her 
all  Scotland,  she  had  bound  to  her  the  strongest  and  most 
vigorous  party  among  the  nobles  of  the  north.  The  Lords 
of  the  Congregation  promised  to  be  obedient  to  Elizabeth 
in  all  such  matters  as  might  not  lead  to  the  overthrow  of 
their  country's  rights  or  of  Scottish  liberties.  They  were 
bound  to  her  not  only  by  the  war  but  by  the  events  that  fol- 
lowed the  war.  A  Parliament  at  Edinburgh  accepted  the 
Calvinistic  confession  of  Geneva  as  the  religion  of  Scotland, 
abolished  the  temporal  jurisdiction  of  the  bishops,  and 
prohibited  the  celebration  of  the  Mass.  The  Act  and  the 
Treaty  were  alike  presented  for  confirmation  to  Francis 
and  Mary.  They  were  roughly  put  aside,  for  the  French 
King  would  give  no  sanction  to  a  successful  revolt,  and 
Mary  had  no  mind  to  waive  her  claim  to  the  English 
throne.  But  from  action  the  two  sovereigns  were  held  back 
by  the  troubles  in  France.  It  was  in  vain  that  the  Guisea 
strove  to  restore  political  and  religious  unity  by  an  assembly 
of  the  French  notables :  the  notables  met  only  to  receive  a 
demand  for  freedom  of  worship  from  the  Huguenots  of  the 
west,  and  to  force  the  Government  to  promise  a  national 


326  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

council  for  the  settlement  of  the  religious  disputes  as  well 
as  a  gathering  of  the  States- General.  The  counsellors  of 
Francis  resolved  to  anticipate  this  meeting  by  a  sudden 
stroke  at  the  heretics;  and  as  a  preliminary  step  the  chiefs 
of  the  House  of  Bourbon  were  seized  at  the  court  and  the 
Prince  of  Conde  threatened  with  death.  The  success  of 
this  measure  roused  anew  the  wrath  of  the  young  King  at 
the  demands  of  the  Scots,  and  at  the  close  of  1560  Francis 
was  again  nursing  plans  of  vengeance  on  the  Lords  of  the 
Congregation.  But  Elizabeth's  good  fortune  still  proved 
true  to  her.  The  projects  of  the  Guises  were  suddenly 
foiled  by  the  young  King's  death.  The  power  of  Mary 
Stuart  and  her  kindred  came  to  an  end,  for  the  childhood 
of  Charles  the  Ninth  gave  the  regency  over  France  to  the 
Queen-mother,  Catharine  of  Medicis,  and  the  policy  of 
Catharine  secured  England  and  Scotland  alike  from 
danger  of  attack.  Her  temper,  like  that  of  Elizabeth,  was 
a  purely  political  temper ;  her  aim  was  to  balance  Catholics 
against  Protestants  to  the  profit  of  the  throne.  She  needed 
peace  abroad  to  preserve  this  political  and  religious  balance 
at  home,  and  though  she  made  some  fruitless  efforts  to  re- 
new the  old  friendship  with  Scotland,  she  had  no  mind  to 
intrigue  like  the  Guises  with  the  English  Catholics  nor  to 
back  Mary  Stuart's  pretensions  to  the  English  throne. 

With  Scotland  as  an  ally  and  with  France  at  peace 
Elizabeth's  throne  at  last  seemed  secure.  The  outbreak 
of  the  strife  between  the  Old  Faith  and  the  New  indeed, 
if  it  gave  the  Queen  safety  abroad,  somewhat  weakened 
her  at  home.  The  sense  of  a  religious  change  which  her 
caution  had  done  so  much  to  disguise  broke  slowly  on 
England  as  it  saw  the  Queen  allying  herself  with  Scotch 
Calvinists  and  French  Huguenots;  and  the  compromise 
she  had  hoped  to  establish  in  matters  of  worship  became 
hourly  less  possible  as  the  more  earnest  Catholics  discerned 
the  Protestant  drift  of  Elizabeth's  policy.  But  Philip  still 
held  them  back  from  any  open  resistance.  There  was 
much  indeed  to  move  him  from  his  old  support  of  the 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  327 

Queen.  The  widowhood  of  Mary  Stuart  freed  him  from 
his  dread  of  a  permanent  annexation  of  Scotland  by  France 
as  well  as  of  a  French  annexation  of  England,  while  the 
need  of  holding  England  as  a  check  on  French  hostility  to 
the  House  of  Austria  grew  weaker  as  the  outbreak  of  civil 
war  between  the  Guises  and  their  opponents  rendered 
French  hostility  less  possible.  Elizabeth's  support  of  the 
Huguenots  drove  the  Spanish  King  to  a  burst  of  passion., 
A  Protestant  France  not  only  outraged  his  religious  bigotry, 
.  but,  as  he  justly  feared,  it  would  give  an  impulse  to  heresy 
throughout  his  possessions  in  the  Netherlands  which  would 
make  it  hard  to  keep  his  hold  upon  them.  Philip  noted 
that  the  success  of  the  Scotch  Calvinists  had  been  followed 
by  the  revolt  of  the  Calvinists  in  France.  He  could  hardly 
doubt  that  the  success  of  the  French  Huguenots  would  be 
followed  by  a  rising  of  the  Calvinists  in  the  Low  Countries, 
"Religion,"  he  told  Elizabeth  angrily,  "was  being  made  a 
cloak  for  anarchy  and  revolution."  But  vexed  as  Philip 
was  with  her  course  both  abroad  and  at  home,  he  was  still 
far  from  withdrawing  his  support  from  Elizabeth.  Even 
now  he  could  not  look  upon  the  Queen  as  lost  to  Catholi- 
cism. He  knew  how  her  course  both  at  home  and  abroad 
had  been  forced  on  her  not  by  religious  enthusiasm  but  by 
political  necessity,  and  he  still  "  trusted  that  ere  long  God 
would  give  us  either  a  general  council  or  a  good  Pope  who 
would  correct  abuses  and  then  all  would  go  well.  That 
God  would  allow  so  noble  and  Christian  a  realm  as  Eng- 
land to  break  away  from  Christendom  and  run  the  risk  of 
perdition  he  could  not  believe." 

What  was  needed,  Philip  thought,  was  a  change  of 
policy  in  the  Papacy.  The  bigotry  of  Paul  the  Fourth 
had  driven  England  from  the  obedience  of  the  Roman  see. 
The  gentler  policy  of  Pius  the  Fourth  might  yet  restore 
her  to  it.  Pius  was  as  averse  from  any  break  with  Eliza- 
beth as  Philip  was.  He  censured  bitterly  the  harshnew 
of  his  predecessor.  The  loss  of  Scotland  and  the  threat- 
ened loss  of  France  he  laid  to  the  charge  of  the  wars  which 


828  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

Paul  had  stirred  up  against  Philip  and  which  had  opened 
a  way  for  the  spread  of  Calvinism  in  both  kingdoms. 
England,  he  held,  could  have  been  easily  preserved  for 
Catholicism  but  for  Paul's  rejection  of  the  conciliatory 
efforts  of  Pole.  When  he  ascended  the  Papal  throne  at 
the  end  of  1559  indeed  the  accession  of  England  to  the  Ref- 
ormation seemed  complete.  The  royal  supremacy  was 
re-established :  the  Mass  abolished :  the  English  Liturgy 
restored.  A  new  episcopate,  drawn  from  the  Calvinistic 
refugees,  was  being  gathered  round  Matthew  Parker.  But 
Pius  would  not  despair.  He  saw  no  reason  why  England 
should  not  again  be  Catholic.  He  knew  that  the  bulk  of 
its  people  clung  to  the  older  religion,  if  they  clung  also  to 
independence  of  the  Papal  jurisdiction  and  to  the  seculari- 
zation of  the  Abbey-lands.  The  Queen,  as  he  believed, 
had  been  ready  for  a  compromise  at  her  accession,  and  he 
was  ready  to  make  terms  with  her  now.  In  the  spring  of 
1560  therefore  he  dispatched  Parpaglia,  a  follower  of  Pole, 
to  open  negotiations  with  Elizabeth.  The  moment  which 
the  Pope  had  chosen  was  a  critical  one  for  the  Queen.  She 
was  in  the  midst  of  the  Scotch  war,  and  her  forces  had  just 
been  repulsed  in  an  attempt  to  storm  the  walls  of  Leith. 
Such  a  repulse  woke  fears  of  conspiracy  among  the  Catho- 
lic nobles  of  the  northern  border,  and  a  refusal  to  receive 
the  legate  would  have  driven  them  to  an  open  rising.  On 
the  other  hand  the  reception  of  Parpaglia  would  have 
alienated  the  Protestants,  shaken  the  trusts  of  the  Lords 
of  the  Congregation  in  the  Queen's  support,  and  driven 
them  to  make  terms  with  Francis  and  Mary.  In  either 
case  Scotland  fell  again  under  the  rule  of  France,  and  the 
throne  of  Elizabeth  was  placed  in  greater  peril  than  ever. 
So  great  was  the  Queen's  embarrassment  that  she  availed 
herself  of  Cecil's  absence  in  the  north  to  hold  out  hopes  of 
the  legate's  admission  to  the  realm  and  her  own  reconcilia- 
tion with  the  Papacy.  But  she  was  freed  from  these  dif- 
ficulties by  the  resolute  intervention  of  Philip.  If  he  dis- 
approved of  her  policy  in  Scotland  he  had  no  mind  that 


CHAP.  3.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  329 

Scotland  should  become  wholly  French  or  Elizabeth  be 
really  shaken  on  her  throne.  He  ordered  the  legate  there- 
fore to  be  detained  in  Flanders  till  his  threats  had  obtained 
from  the  Pope  an  order  for  his  recall. 

But  Pius  was  far  from  abandoning  his  bishops.  After 
ten  years'  suspension  he  had  again  summoned  the  Council 
of  Trent.  The  cry  for  Church  reform,  the  threat  of  na- 
tional synods  in  Spain  and  in  France,  forced  this  message 
on  the  Pope ;  and  Pius  availed  himself  of  the  assembly  of 
the  Council  to  make  a  fresh  attempt  to  turn  the  tide  of  the 
Reformation  and  to  win  back  the  Protestant  Churches  to 
Catholicism.  He  called  therefore  on  the  Lutheran  princes 
of  Germany  to  send  doctors  to  the  Council,  and  in  May 
1561,  eight  months  after  Parpaglia's  failure,  dispatched  a 
fresh  nuncio,  Martinengo,  to  invite  Elizabeth  to  send 
ambassadors  to  Trent.  Philip  pressed  for  the  nuncio's 
admission  to  the  realm.  His  hopes  of  the  Queen's  return 
to  the  faith  were  now  being  fed  by  a  new  marriage-nego- 
tiation ;  for  on  the  withdrawal  of  the  Archduke  of  Austria 
in  sheer  weariness  of  Elizabeth's  treachery,  she  had  en- 
couraged her  old  playfellow,  Lord  Robert  Dudley,  to  hope 
for  her  hand  and  to  amuse  Philip  by  pledges  of  bringing 
back  "the  religion,"  should  the  help  of  the  Spanish  king 
enable  him  to  win  it.  Philip  gave  his  help,  but  Dudley 
remained  a  suitor,  and  the  hopes  of  a  Catholic  revolution 
became  fainter  than  ever.  The  Queen  would  suffer  no 
landing  of  a  legate  in  her  realm.  The  invitation  to  the 
Council  fared  no  better.  The  Lutheran  states  of  North 
Germany  had  already  refused  to  attend.  The  Council, 
they  held,  was  no  longer  a  council  of  reunion.  In  its 
earlier  session  it  had  formally  condemned  the  very  doc- 
trine on  which  Protestantism  was  based ;  and  to  join  it 
now  would  simply  be  to  undo  all  that  Luther  had  done. 
Elizabeth  showed  as  little  hesitation.  The  hour  of  her 
triumph,  when  a  Calvinistic  Scotland  and  a  Calvinistic 
France  proved  the  mainstays  of  her  policy,  was  no  hour  of 
submission  to  the  Papacy.  In  spite  of  Philip's  entreaties 


330  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

she  refused  to  send  envoys  to  what  was  not  "  a  free  Chris- 
tian Council."  The  refusal  was  decisive  in  marking  Eliza- 
beth's position.  The  long  period  of  hesitation,  of  drift, 
was  over.  All  chance  of  submission  to  the  Papacy  was  at 
an  end.  In  joining  the  Lutheran  states  in  their  rejection 
of  this  Council,  England  had  definitely  ranged  itself  on 
the  side  of  the  Reformation. 


..      CHAPTER  IV. 

ENGLAND  AND   MARY   STUART. 
1561—1567. 

WHAT  had  hitherto  kept  the  bulk  of  Elizabeth's  subjects 
from  opposition  to  her  religious  system  was  a  disbelief  ID 
its  permanence.  Englishmen  had  seen  English  religion 
changed  too  often  to  believe  that  it  would  change  no  more. 
When  the  Commissioners  forced  a  Protestant  ritual  on  St. 
John's  College  at  Oxford,  its  founder,  Sir  Thomas  White, 
simply  took  away  its  vestments  and  crucifixes,  and  hid 
them  in  his  house  for  the  better  times  that  every  zealous 
Catholic  trusted  would  have  their  turn.  They  believed 
that  a  Catholic  marriage  would  at  once  bring  such  a  turn 
about;  and  if  Elizabeth  dismissed  the  offer  of  Philip's 
hand  she  played  long  and  assiduously  with  that  of  a  son 
of  the  Emperor,  an  archduke  of  the  same  Austrian  house. 
But  the  alliance  with  the  Scotch  heretics  proved  a  rough 
blow  to  this  trust:  and  after  the  repulse  at  Leith  there 
were  whispers  that  the  two  great  Catholic  nobles  of  the 
border,  the  Earls  of  Northumberland  and  Westmoreland, 
were  only  waiting  for  the  failure  of  the  Scotch  enterprise 
to  rise  on  behalf  of  the  older  faith.  Whatever  their  pro- 
jects were,  they  were  crushed  by  the  Queen's  success. 
With  the  Lords  of  the  Congregation  masters  across  the 
border  the  northern  Earls  lay  helpless  between  the  two 
Protestant  realms.  In  the  mass  of  men  loyalty  was  still 
too  strong  for  any  dream  of  revolt ;  but  there  was  a  grow- 
ing uneasiness  lest  they  should  find  themselves  heretics 
after  all,  which  the  failure  of  the  Austrian  match  and  the 
help  given  to  the  Huguenots  was  fanning  into  active  dis- 
content. It  was  this  which  gave  such  weight  to  the 


333  HISTORY  OF  THti  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI 

Queen's  rejection  of  the  summons  to  Trent.  Whatever 
color  she  might  strive  to  put  upon  it,  the  bulk  of  her  sub- 
jects accepted  the  refusal  as  a  final  break  with  Catholicism, 
as  a  final  close  to  all  hope  of  their  reunion  with  the  Cath- 
olic Church. 

The  Catholic  disaffection  which  the  Queen  was  hence- 
forth to  regard  as  her  greatest  danger  was  thus  growing 
into  life  when  in  August  1561,  but  a  few  months  after  the 
Queen's  refusal  to  acknowledge  the  Council,  Mary  Stuart 
landed  at  Leith.  Girl  as  she  was,  and  she  was  only  nine- 
teen, Mary  was  hardly  inferior  in  intellectual  power  to 
Elizabeth  herself,  while  in  fire  and  grace  and  brilliancy  of 
temper  she  stood  high  above  her.  She  brought  with  her 
the  voluptuous  refinement  of  the  French  Renascence ;  she 
would  lounge  for  days  in  bed,  and  rise  only  at  night  for 
dances  and  music.  But  her  frame  was  of  iron,  and  in- 
capable of  fatigue;  she  galloped  ninety  miles  after  her  last 
defeat  without  a  pause  save  to  change  horses.  She  loved 
risk  and  adventure  and  the  ring  of  arms ;  as  she  rode  in  a 
foray  to  the  north  the  swordsmen  beside  her  heard  her 
wish  she  was  a  man  "  to  know  what  life  it  was  to  lie  all 
night  in  the  fields,  or  to  walk  on  the  cawsey  with  a  jack 
and  knapschalle,  a  Glasgow  buckler  and  a  broadsword." 
But  in  the  closet  she  was  as  cool  and  astute  a  politician  as 
Elizabeth  herself ;  with  plans  as  subtle,  and  of  a  far  wider 
and  bolder  range  than  the  Queen's.  "  Whatever  policy  is 
in  all  the  chief  and  best  practised  heads  of  France,"  wrote 
an  English  envoy,  "  whatever  craft,  falsehood,  and  deceit 
is  in  all  the  subtle  brains  of  Scotland,  is  either  fresh  in 
this  woman's  memory,  or  she  can  fetch  it  out  with  a  wet 
finger."  Her  beauty,  her  exquisite  grace  of  manner,  her 
generosity  of  temper  and  warmth  of  affection,  her  frank- 
ness of  speech,  her  sensibility,  her  gayety,  her  womanly 
tears,  her  manlike  courage,  the  play  and  freedom  of  her 
nature,  the  flashes  of  poetry  that  broke  from  her  at  every 
intense  moment  of  her  life,  flung  a  spell  over  friend  or  foe 
which  has  only  deepened  with  the  lapse  of  years.  Even 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1640— 1«08.  33? 

to  Knollys,  the  sternest  Puritan  of  his  day,  she  seemed  in 
her  later  captivity  to  be  "  a  notable  woman. "  "  She  seemeth 
to  regard  no  ceremonious  honor  besides  the  acknowledg- 
ment of  her  estate  royal.  She  showeth  a  disposition  to 
speak  much,  to  be  bold,  to  be  pleasant,  to  be  very  familiar. 
She  showeth  a  great  desire  to  be  avenged  on  her  enemies, 
She  showeth  a  readiness  to  expose  herself  to  all  perils  in 
hope  of  victory.  She  desireth  much  to  hear  of  hardiness 
and  valiancy,  commending  by  name  all  approved  hardy 
men  of  her  country  though  they  be  her  enemies,  and  she 
concealeth  no  cowardice  even  in  her  friends." 

Of  the  stern  bigotry,  the  intensity  of  passion,  which  lay 
beneath  the  winning  surface  of  Mary's  womanhood,  met, 
as  yet  knew  nothing.  But  they  at  once  recognized  her 
political  ability.  Till  now  she  had  proved  in  her  own  de- 
spite a  powerful  friend  to  the  Reformation.  It  was  her 
claim  of  the  English  crown  which  had  seated  Elizabeth  on 
the  throne,  had  thrown  her  on  the  support  of  the  Protes- 
tants, and  had  secured  to  the  Queen  in  the  midst  of  her  re- 
ligious changes  the  protection  of  Philip  of  Spain.  It  was 
the  dread  of  Mary's  ambition  which  had  forced  Elizabeth 
to  back  the  Lords  of  the  Congregation,  and  the  dread  of 
her  husband's  ambition  which  had  driven  Scotland  to 
throw  aside  its  jealousy  of  England  and  ally  itself  with 
the  Queen.  But  with  the  death  of  Francis  Mary's  position 
had  wholly  changed.  She  had  no  longer  the  means  of 
carrying  out  her  husband's  threats  of  crushing  the  Lords 
of  the  Congregation  by  force  of  arms.  The  forces  of 
France  were  in  the  hands  of  Catharine  of  Medicis ;  and 
Catharine  was  parted  from  her  both  by  her  dread  of  the 
Guises  and  by  a  personal  hate.  Yet  the  attitude  of  the 
lords  .became  every  day  more  threatening.  They  were 
pressing  Elizabeth  to  marry  the  Earl  of  Arran,  a  chief  of 
the  house  of  Hamilton  and  near  heir  to  the  throne,  a  mar- 
riage which  pointed  to  the  complete  exclusion  of  Mary  from 
her  realm.  Even  when  this  project  failed,  they  rejected 
with  stern  defiance  the  young  (jueen's  proposal  of  restoring 


834  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI,  j 

_ i 

the  old  religion  as  a  condition  of  her  return.  If  they  in- 
vited her  to  Scotland,  it  was  in  the  name  of  the  Parliament 
which  had  set  up  Calvinism  as  the  law  of  the  land.  Bitter 
as  such  terms  must  have  been  Mary  had  no  choice  but  to 
submit  to  them.  To  accept  the  offer  of  the  Catholic  lords 
of  Northern  Scotland  with  the  Earl  of  Huntly  at  their 
head,  who  proposed  to  welcome  her  in  arms  as  a  champion 
of  Catholicism,  was  to  risk  a  desperate  civil  war,  a  war 
which  would  in  any  case  defeat  a  project  far  dearer  to  her 
than  her  plans  for  winning  Scotland,  the  project  she  was 
nursing  of  winning  the  English  realm.  In  the  first  months 
of  her  widowhood  therefore  her  whole  attitude  was  re- 
versed. She  received  the  leader  of  the  Protestant  Lords, 
her  half  brother,  Lord  James  Stuart,  at  her  court.  She 
showed  her  favor  to  him  by  creating  him  Earl  of  Murray. 
She  adopted  his  policy  of  accepting  the  religious  changes 
in  Scotland  and  of  bringing  Elizabeth  by  friendly  pressure 
to  acknowledge  her  right,  not  of  reigning  in  her  stead,  but 
of  following  her  on  the  throne.  But  while  thus  in  form 
adopting  Murray's  policy  Mary  at  heart  was  resolute  to 
carry  out  her  own  policy  too.  If  she  must  win  the  Scots 
by  submitting  to  a  Protestant  system  in  Scotland,  she 
would  rally  round  her  the  English  Catholics  by  remaining 
a  Catholic  herself.  If  she  ceased  to  call  herself  Queen  of 
England  and  only  pressed  for  her  acknowledgment  as 
rightful  successor  to  Elizabeth,  she  would  not  formally 
abandon  her  claim  to  reign  as  rightful  Queen  in  Elizabeth's 
stead.  Above  all  she  would  give  her  compliance  with 
Murray's  counsels  no  legal  air.  No  pressure  either  from 
her  brother  or  from  Elizabeth  could  bring  the  young  Queen 
to  give  her  royal  confirmation  to  the  Parliamentary  Acts 
which  established  the  new  religion  in  Scotland,  or  her 
signature  to  the  Treaty  of  Edinburgh.  In  spite  of  her 
habitual  caution  the  bold  words  which  broke  from  Mary 
Stuart  on  Elizabeth's  refusal  of  a  safe-conduct  betrayed 
her  hopes.  "  I  came  to  France  in  spite  of  her  brother's 
opposition,"  she  said,  "and  I  will  return  in  spite  of  her 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  335 

own.  She  has  combined  with  rebel  subjects  of  mine :  but 
there  are  rebel  subjects  in  England  too  who  would  gladly 
listen  to  a  call  from  me.  I  am  a  Queen  as  well  as  she, 
and  not  altogether  friendless.  And  perhaps  I  have  as 
great  a  soul  too !" 

She  saw  indeed  the  new  strength  which  was  given  her 
by  her  husband's  death.  Her  cause  was  no  longer  ham- 
pered, either  in  Scotland  or  in  England,  by  a  national 
jealousy  of  French  interference.  It  was  with  a  resolve  to 
break  the  league  between  Elizabeth  and  the  Scotch  Protes- 
tants, to  unite  her  own  realm  around  her,  and  thus  to  give 
a  firm  base  for  her  intrigues  among  the  English  Catholics, 
that  Mary  Stuart  landed  at  Leith.  The  effect  of  her  pres- 
ence was  marvellous.  Her  personal  fascination  revived 
the  national  loyalty,  and  swept  all  Scotland  to  her  feet. 
Knox,  the  greatest  and  sternest  of  the  Calvinistic  preach- 
ers, alone  withstood  her  spell.  The  rough  Scotch  nobles 
owned  that  there  was  in  Mary  "  some  enchantment  whereby 
men  are  bewitched."  It  was  clear  indeed  from  the  first 
that,  loyal  as  Scotland  might  be,  its  loyalty  would  be  of 
little  service  to  the  Queen  if  she  attacked  the  new  religion. 
At  her  entry  into  Edinburgh  the  children  of  the  pageant 
presented  her  with  a  Bible  and  "made  some  speech  con- 
cerning the  putting  away  of  the  Mass,  and  thereafter  sang 
a  psalm."  It  was  only  with  difficulty  that  Murray  won 
for  her  the  right  of  celebrating  Mass  at  her  court.  But 
for  the  religious  difficulty  Mary  was  prepared.  While 
steadily  abstaining  from  any  legal  confirmation  of  the  new 
faith,  and  claiming  for  her  French  followers  freedom  of 
Catholic  worship,  she  denounced  any  attempt  to  meddle 
with  the  form  of  religion  she  found  existing  in  the  realm. 
Such  a  toleration  was  little  likely  to  satisfy  the  more 
fanatical  among  the  ministers;  but  even  Knox  was  con- 
tent with  her  promise  "to  hear  the  preaching,"  and 
brought  his  brethren  to  a  conclusion,  as  "  she  might  be 
won,"  "to  suffer  her  for  a  time."  If  the  preachers  indeed 
maintained  that  the  Queen's  liberty  of  worship  "  should  be 


336  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

their  thraldom,"  the  bulk  of  the  nation  was  content  with 
Mary's  acceptance  of  the  religious  state  of  the  realm.  Nor 
was  it  distasteful  to  the  secular  leaders  of  the  reforming 
party.  The  Protestant  Lords  preferred  their  imperfect 
work  to  the  more  complete  reformation  which  Knox  and 
his  fellows  called  for.  They  had  no  mind  to  adopt  the 
whole  Calvinistic  system.  They  had  adopted  the  Genevan 
Confession  of  Faith ;  but  they  rejected  a  book  of  discipline 
which  would  have  organized  the  Church  on  the  Huguenot 
model.  All  demands  for  restitution  of  the  church  property 
which  they  were  pillaging  they  set  aside  as  a  "  fond  imagi- 
nation. "  The  new  ministers  remained  poor  and  dependent, 
while  noble  after  noble  was  hanging  an  abbot  to  seize  his 
estates  in  forfeiture,  or  roasting  a  commendator  to  wring 
from  him  a  grant  of  abbey -lands  in  fee. 

The  attitude  of  the  Lords  favored  the  Queen's  designs. 
She  was  in  effect  bartering  her  toleration  of  their  religion 
in  exchange  for  her  reception  in  Scotland  and  for  their 
support  of  her  claim  to  be  named  Elizabeth's  successor. 
With  Mary's  landing  at  Leith  the  position  of  the  English 
Queen  had  suddenly  changed.  Her  work  seemed  utterly 
undone.  The  national  unity  for  which  she  was  struggling 
was  broken.  The  presence  of  Mary  woke  the  party  of  the 
old  faith  to  fresh  hopes  and  a  fresh  activity,  while  it  roused 
a  fresh  fear  and  fanaticism  in  the  party  of  the  new.  Scot- 
land, where  Elizabeth's  influence  had  seemed  supreme,  was 
struck  from  her  hands.  Not  only  was  it  no  longer  a  sup- 
port; it  was  again  a  danger.  Loyalty,  national  pride,  a 
just  and  statesmanlike  longing  for  union  with  England, 
united  her  northern  subjects  round  the  Scottish  Queen  in  her 
claim  to  be  recognized  as  Elizabeth's  successor.  Even  Mur- 
ray counted  on  Elizabeth's  consent  to  this  claim  to  bring 
Mary  into  full  harmony  with  his  policy,  and  to  preserve 
the  alliance  between  England  and  Scotland.  But  the  ques- 
tion of  the  succession,  like  the  question  of  her  marriage, 
was  with  Elizabeth  a  question  of  life  and  death.  Her 
wedding  with  a  Catholic  or  a  Protestant  suitor  would  have 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  337 


equally  the  end  of  her  system  of  balance  and  national 
union,  a  signal  for  the  revolt  of  the  party  which  she  disap- 
pointed and  for  the  triumphant  dictation  of  the  party  which 
she  satisfied.  "If  a  Catholic  prince  come  here,"  wrote  a 
Spanish  ambassador  while  pressing  her  marriage  with  an 
Austrian  archduke,  "  the  first  Mass  he  attends  will  be  the 
signal  for  a  revolt."  It  was  so  with  the  question  of  the 
succession.  To  name  a  Protestant  successor  from  the 
House  of  Suffolk  would  have  driven  every  Catholic  to  in- 
surrection. To  name  Mary  was  to  stir  Protestantism  to  a 
rising  of  despair,  and  to  leave  Elizabeth  at  the  mercy  of 
every  fanatical  assassin  who  wished  to  clear  the  way  for  a 
Catholic  ruler.  Yet  to  leave  both  unrecognized  was  to 
secure  the  hostility  of  both,  as  well  as  the  discontent  of  the 
people  at  large,  who  looked  on  the  settlement  of  the  succes- 
sion as  the  primary  need  of  their  national  life.  From  the 
moment  of  Mary's  landing  therefore  Elizabeth  found  her- 
self thrown  again  on  an  attitude  of  self-defence.  Every 
course  of  direct  action  was  closed  to  her.  She  could  satisfy 
neither  Protestant  nor  Catholic,  neither  Scotland  nor  Eng- 
land. Her  work  could  only  be  a  work  of  patience ;  the  one 
possible  policy  was  to  wait,  to  meet  dangers  as  they  rose, 
to  watch  for  possible  errors  in  her  rival's  course,  above  all 
by  diplomacy,  by  finesse,  by  equivocation,  by  delay,  to 
gain  time  till  the  dark  sky  cleared. 

Nothing  better  proves  Elizabeth's  political  ability  than 
the  patience,  the  tenacity,  with  which  for  the  six  years 
that  followed  she  played  this  waiting  game.  She  played 
it  utterly  alone.  Even  Cecil  at  moments  of  peril  called 
for  a  policy  of  action.  But  his  counsels  never  moved  the 
Queen.  Her  restless  ingenuity  vibrated  ceaselessly,  like 
the  needle  of  a  compass,  from  one  point  to  another,  now 
stirring  hopes  in  Catholic,  now  in  Protestant,  now  quiver- 
ing toward  Mary's  friendship,  then  as  suddenly  trembling 
off  to  incur  her  hate.  But  tremble  and  vibrate  as  it  might, 
Elizabeth's  purpose  returned  ever  to  the  same  unchanging 
point.  It  was  in  vain  that  Mary  made  a  show  of  friend- 


338  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

ship,  and  negotiated  for  a  meeting  at  York,  where  the 
question  of  the  succession  might  be  settled.  It  was  in 
vain  that  to  prove  her  lack  of  Catholic  fanaticism  she  even 
backed  Murray  in  crushing  the  Earl  of  Huntly,  the  fore- 
most of  her  Catholic  nobles,  or  that  she  held  out  hopes  to 
the  English  envoy  of  her  conformity  to  the  faith  of  the 
Church  of  England.  It  was  to  no  purpose  that,  to  meet 
the  Queen's  dread  of  her  marriage  with  a  Catholic  prince 
when  her  succession  was  once  acknowledged,  a  marriage 
which  would  in  such  a  case  have  shaken  Elizabeth  on  her 
throne,  Mary  listened  even  to  a  proposal  for  a  match  with 
Lord  Leicester,  and  that  Murray  supported  such  a  step,  if 
Elizabeth  would  recognize  Mary  as  her  heir.  Elizabeth 
promised  that  she  would  do  nothing  to  impair  Mary's 
rights ;  but  she  would  do  nothing  to  own  them.  "  I  am 
not  so  foolish,"  she  replied  with  bitter  irony  to  Mary's  en- 
treaties, "  I  am  not  so  foolish  as  to  hang  a  winding-sheet 
before  my  eyes."  That  such  a  refusal  was  wise  time  was 
to  show.  But  even  then  it  is  probable  that  Mary's  in- 
trigues were  not  wholly  hidden  from  the  English  Queen. 
Elizabeth's  lying  paled  indeed  before  the  cool  duplicity 
of  this  girl  of  nineteen.  While  she  was  befriending  Prot- 
estantism in  her  realm,  and  holding  out  hopes  of  her 
mounting  the  English  throne  as  a  Protestant  Queen, 
Mary  Stuart  was  pledging  herself  to  the  Pope  to  restore 
Catholicism  on  either  side  the  border,  and  pressing  Philip 
to  aid  her  in  this  holy  work  by  giving  her  the  hand  of  his 
son  Don  Carlos.  It  was  with  this  design  that  she  was 
fooling  the  Scotch  Lords  and  deceiving  Murray :  it  was 
with  this  end  that  she  strove  in  vain  to  fool  Elizabeth  and 
Knox. 

But  pierce  through  the  web  of  lying  as  she  might,  the 
pressure  on  the  English  Queen  became  greater  every  day. 
What  had  given  Elizabeth  security  was  the  adhesion  of 
the  Scotch  Protestants  and  the  growing  strength  of  the 
Huguenots  in  France.  But  the  firm  government  of  Mur- 
ray and  her  own  steady  abstinence  from  any  meddling 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  339 

with  the  national  religion  was  giving  Mary  a  hold  upon 
Scotland  which  drew  Protestant  after  Protestant  to  her 
side;  while  the  tide  of  French  Calvinism  was  suddenly 
rolled  back  by  the  rise  of  a  Catholic  party  under  the  lead- 
ership of  the  Guises.  Under  Catharine  of  Medicis  France 
had  seemed  to  be  slowly  drifting  to  the  side  of  Protestant- 
ism. While  the  Queen-mother  strove  to  preserve  a  relig- 
ious truce  the  attitude  of  the  Huguenots  was  that  of  men 
sure  of  success.  Their  head,  the  King  of  Navarre,  boasted 
that  before  the  year  was  out  he  would  have  the  Gospel 
preached  throughout  the  realm,  and  his  confidence  seemed 
justified  by  the  rapid  advance  of  the  new  opinions.  They 
were  popular  among  the  merchant  class.  The  noblesse 
was  fast  becoming  Huguenot.  At  the  court  itself  the 
nobles  feasted  ostentatiously  on  the  fast  days  of  the  Church 
and  flocked  to  the  Protestant  preachings.  The  clergy 
themselves  seemed  shaken.  Bishops  openly  abjured  the 
older  faith.  Coligni's  brother,  the  Cardinal  of  Chatillon, 
celebrated  the  communion  instead  of  mass  in  his  own  epis- 
copal church  at  Beauvais,  and  married  a  wife.  So  irre- 
sistible was  the  movement  that  Catharine  saw  no  way  of 
preserving  France  to  Catholicism  but  by  the  largest  con- 
cessions; and  in  the  summer  of  1561  she  called  on  the  Pope 
to  allow  the  removal  of  images,  the  administration  of  the 
sacrament  in  both  kinds,  and  the  abolition  of  private 
masses.  Her  demands  were  outstripped  by  those  of  an 
assembly  of  deputies  from  the  states  which  met  at  Pon- 
tofee.  These  called  for  the  confiscation  of  Church  prop- 
erty, for  freedom  of  conscience  and  of  worship,  and  above 
all  for  a  national  Council  in  which  every  question  should 
be  decided  by  "  the  Word  of  God."  France  seemed  on  the 
verge  of  becoming  Protestant;  and  at  a  moment  when 
Protestantism  had  won  England  and  Scotland,  and  ap- 
peared to  be  fast  winning  southern  as  well  as  northern 
Germany,  the  accession  of  France  would  have  determined 
the  triumph  of  the  Reformation.  The  importance  of  its 
attitude  was  seen  in  its  effect  on  the  Papacy.  It  was  the 


340  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

call  of  France  for  a  national  Council  that  drove  Rome  once 
more  to  summon  the  Council  of  Trent.  It  was  seen  too  in 
the  policy  of  Mary  Stuart.  With  France  tending  to  Cal- 
vinism it  was  no  time  for  meddling  with  the  Calvinism  of 
Scotland;  and  Mary  rivalled  Catharine  herself  in  her 
pledges  of  toleration.  It  was  seen  above  all  in  the  anxiety 
of  Philip  of  Spain.  To  preserve  the  Netherlands  was  still 
the  main  aim  of  Philip's  policy,  and  with  France  as  well 
as  England  Protestant,  a  revolt  of  the  Netherlands  against 
the  cruelties  of  the  Inquisition  became  inevitable.  By 
appeals  therefore  to  religious  passion,  by  direct  pledges  of 
aid,  the  Spanish  King  strove  to  rally  the  party  of  the 
Guises  against  the  system  of  Catharine. 

But  Philip's  intrigues  were  hardly  needed  to  rouse  the 
French  Catholics  to  arms.  If  the  Guises  had  withdrawn 
from  court  it  was  only  to  organize  resistance  to  the  Hugue- 
nots. They  were  aided  by  the  violence  of  their  opponents. 
The  Huguenot  lords  believed  themselves  irresistible ;  they 
boasted  that  the  churches  numbered  more  than  three  hun- 
dred thousand  men  fit  to  bear  arms.  But  the  mass  of  the 
nation  was  hardly  touched  by  the  new  Gospel;  and  the 
Guises  stirred  busily  the  fanaticism  of  the  poor.  The 
failure  of  a  conference  between  the  advocates  of  either 
faith  was  the  signal  for  a  civil  war  in  the  south.  Catha- 
rine strove  in  vain  to  allay  the  strife  at  the  opening  of  1562 
by  an  edict  of  pacification ;  Guise  struck  his  counter-blow 
by  massacring  a  Protestant  congregation  at  Vassy,  by  en- 
tering Paris  with  two  thousand  men,  and  by  seizing  the 
Regent  and  the  King.  Conde  and  Coligni  at  once  took  up 
arms ;  and  the  fanaticism  of  the  Huguenots  broke  out  in  a 
terrible  work  of  destruction  which  rivalled  that  of  the 
Scots.  All  Western  France,  half  Southern  France,  the 
provinces  along  the  Loire  and  the  Rhone,  rose  for  the 
Gospel.  Only  Paris  and  the  north  of  France  held  firmly 
to  Catholicism.  But  the  plans  of  the  Guises  had  been 
ably  laid.  The  Huguenots  found  themselves  girt  in  by  a 
ring  of  foes.  Philip  sent  a  body  of  Spaniards  into  Gas- 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  341 

cony,  Italians  and  Piedmontese  in  the  pay  of  the  Pope  and 
the  Duke  of  Savoy  marched  upon  the  Rhone.  Seven 
thousand  German  mercenaries  appeared  in  the  camp  of 
the  Guises.  Panic  ran  through  the  Huguenot  forces; 
they  broke  up  as  rapidly  as  they  had  gathered ;  and  resist- 
ance was  soon  only  to  be  found  in  Normandy  and  in  tha 
mountains  of  the  Cevennes. 

Conde  appealed  for  aid  to  the  German  princes  and  to 
England :  and  grudge  as  she  might  the  danger  and  cost  of 
such  a  struggle,  Elizabeth  saw  that  her  aid  must  be  given, 
She  knew  that  the  battle  with  her  opponent  had  to  be 
fought  abroad  rather  than  at  home.  The  Guises  were 
Mary's  uncles;  and  their  triumph  meant  trouble  in  Scot- 
land and  worse  trouble  in  England.  In  September  there- 
fore she  concluded  a  treaty  with  the  Huguenots  at  Hamp- 
ton Court,  and  promised  to  supply  them  with  six  thousand 
men  and  a  hundred  thousand  crowns.  The  bargain  she 
drove  was  a  hard  one.  She  knew  that  the  French  had  no 
purpose  of  fulfilling  their  pledge  to  restore  Calais,  and  she 
exacted  the  surrender  of  Havre  into  her  hands  as  a  security 
for  its  restoration.  Her  aid  came  almost  too  late.  The 
Guises  saw  the  need  of  securing  Normandy  if  English  in- 
tervention was  to  be  hindered,  and  a  vigorous  attack 
brought  about  the  submission  of  the  province.  But  the 
Huguenots  were  now  reinforced  by  troops  from  the  German 
princes;  and  at  the  close  of  1562  the  two  armies  met  on 
the  field  of  Dreux.  The  strife  had  already  widened  into 
a  general  war  of  religion.  It  was  the  fight,  not  of  French 
factions,  but  of  Protestantism  and  Catholicism,  that  was 
to  be  fought  out  on  the  fields  of  France.  The  two  warring 
elements  of  Protestantism  were  represented  in  the  Hugue- 
not camp  where  German  Lutherans  stood  side  by  side  with 
the  French  Calvinists.  On  the  other  hand  the  French 
Catholics  were  backed  by  soldiers  from  the  Catholic  can- 
tons of  Switzerland,  from  the  Catholic  states  of  Germany, 
from  Catholic  Italy,  and  from  Catholic  Spain.  The  en- 
counter was  a  desperate  one,  but  it  ended  in  a  virtual 


342  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boos  VI. 

triumph  for  the  Guises.  While  the  German  troops  of 
Coligni  clung  to  the  Norman  coast  in  the  hope  of  sub- 
sidies from  Elizabeth,  the  Duke  of  Guise  was  able  to 
march  at  the  opening  of  1563  on  the  Loire,  and  form  the 
siege  of  Orleans. 

In  Scotland  Mary  Stuart  was  watching  her  uncle's  pro- 
gress with  ever-growing  hope.  The  policy  of  Murray  had 
failed  in  the  end  to  which  she  mainly  looked.  Her  accept- 
ance of  the  new  religion,  her  submission  to  the  Lords  of 
the  Congregation,  had  secured  her  a  welcome  in  Scotland 
and  gathered  the  Scotch  people  round  her  standard.  But 
it  had  done  nothing  for  her  on  the  other  side  of  the  border. 
Two  years  had  gone  by,  and  any  recognition  of  her  right 
of  succession  to  the  English  crown  seemed  as  far  off  as 
ever.  But  Murray's  policy  was  far  from  being  Mary's 
only  resource.  She  had  never  surrendered  herself  in  more 
than  outer  show  to  her  brother's  schemes.  In  heart  she 
had  never  ceased  to  be  a  bigoted  Catholic,  resolute  for  the 
suppression  of  Protestantism  as  soon  as  her  toleration  of  it 
had  given  her  strength  enough  for  the  work.  It  was  this 
that  made  the  strife  between  the  two  Queens  of  such  ter- 
rible moment  for  English  freedom.  Elizabeth  was  fight- 
ing for  more  than  personal  ends.  She  was  fighting  for 
more  than  her  own  occupation  of  the  English  throne. 
Consciously  or  unconsciously  she  was  struggling  to  avert 
from  England  the  rule  of  a  Queen  who  would  have  undone 
the  whole  religious  work  of  the  past  half-century,  who 
would  have  swept  England  back  into  the  tide  of  Catholi- 
cism, and  who  in  doing  this  would  have  blighted  and  crip- 
pled its  national  energies  at  the  very  moment  of  their 
mightiest  development.  It  was  the  presence  of  such  a 
danger  that  sharpened  the  eyes  of  Protestants  on  both  sides 
the  border.  However  she  might  tolerate  the  reformed  re- 
ligion or  hold  out  hopes  of  her  compliance  with  a  reformed 
worship,  no  earnest  Protestant  either  in  England  or  in 
Scotland  could  bring  himself  to  see  other  than  an  enemy 
in  the  Scottish  Queen.  Within  a  few  months  of  her  ar- 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  343 

rival  the  cool  eye  of  Knox  had  pierced  through  the  veil  of 
Mary's  dissimulation.  "  The  Queen,"  he  wrote  to  Cecil, 
"  neither  is  nor  shall  be  of  our  opinion. "  Her  steady  re- 
fusal to  ratify  the  Treaty  of  Edinburgh  or  to  confirm  the 
statutes  on  which  the  Protestantism  of  Scotland  rested  was 
of  far.greater  significance  than  her  support  of  Murray  or 
her  honeyed  messages  to  Elizabeth.  While  the  young 
Queen  looked  coolly  on  at  the  ruin  of  the  Catholic  house 
of  Huntly,  at  the  persecution  of  Catholic  recusants,  at  so 
strict  an  enforcement  of  the  new  worship  that  "  none  within 
the  realm  durst  more  avow  the  hearing  or  saying  of  Mass 
than  the  thieves  of  Liddesdale  durst  avow  their  stealth  in 
presence  of  an  upright  judge,"  she  was  in  secret  corre- 
spondence with  the  Guises  and  the  Pope.  Her  eye  was 
fixed  upon  France.  While  Catharine  of  Medicis  was  all 
powerful,  while  her  edict  secured  toleration  for  the  Hugue- 
nots on  one  side  of  the  sea,  Mary  knew  that  it  was  impos- 
sible to  refuse  toleration  on  the  other.  But  with  the  first 
movement  of  the  Duke  of  Guise  fiercer  hopes  revived. 
Knox  was  "  assured  that  the  Queen  danced  till  after  mid- 
night because  that  she  had  received  letters  that  persecu- 
tion was  begun  in  France,  and  that  her  uncles  were  be- 
ginning to  stir  their  tail,  and  to  trouble  the  whole  realm 
of  France."  Whether  she  gave  such  open  proof  of  her  joy 
or  no,  Mary  woke  to  a  new  energy  at  the  news  of  Guise's 
success.  She  wrote  to  Pope  Pius  to  express  her  regret  that 
the  heresy  of  her  realm  prevented  her  sending  envoys  to 
the  Council  of  Trent.  She  assured  the  Cardinal  of  Lor- 
raine that  she  would  restore  Catholicism  in  her  dominions, 
even  at  the  peril  of  her  life.  She  pressed  on  Philip  of 
Spain  a  proposal  for  her  marriage  with  his  son,  Don  Car- 
los, as  a  match  which  would  make  her  strong  enough  to 
restore  Scotland  to  the  Church. 

The  echo  of  the  French  conflict  was  felt  in  England  as 
in  the  north.  The  English  Protestants  saw  in  it  the  ap 
proach  of  a  struggle  for  life  and  death  at  home.  The 
English  Queen  saw  in  it  a  danger  to  her  throne.  So  great 


344  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

was  Elizabeth's  terror  at  the  victory  of  Dreux  that  she  re- 
solved to  open  her  purse-strings  and  to  hire  fresh  troops 
for  the  Huguenots  in  Germany.  But  her  dangers  grew  at 
home  as  abroad.  The  victory  of  Guise  dealt  the  first  heavy 
blow  at  her  system  of  religious  conformity.  Rome  had 
abandoned  its  dreams  of  conciliation  on  her  refusal* to  own 
the  Council  of  Trent,  and  though  Philip's  entreaties 
brought  Pius  to  suspend  the  issue  of  a  Bull  of  Deposition, 
the  Papacy  opened  the  struggle  by  issuing  in  August  1562 
a  brief  which  pronounced  joining  in  the  Common  Prayer 
schismatic  and  forbade  the  attendance  of  Catholics  at 
church.  On  no  point  was  Elizabeth  so  sensitive,  for  on 
no  point  had  her  policy  seemed  so  successful.  Till  now, 
whatever  might  be  their  fidelity  to  the  older  faith,  few 
Englishmen  had  carried  their  opposition  to  the  Queen's 
changes  so  far  as  to  withdraw  from  religious  communion 
with  those  who  submitted  to  them.  But  with  the  issue  of 
the  brief  this  unbroken  conformity  came  to  an  end.  A 
few  of  the  hotter  Catholics  withdrew  from  church.  Heavy 
fines  were  laid  on  them  as  recusants ;  fines  which,  as  their 
numbers  increased,  became  a  valuable  source  of  supply  for 
the  royal  exchequer.  But  no  fines  could  compensate  for 
the  moral  blow  which  their  withdrawal  dealt.  It  was  the 
beginning  of  a  struggle  which  Elizabeth  had  averted 
through  three  memorable  years.  Protestant  fanaticism 
met  Catholic  fanaticism,  and  as  news  of  the  massacre  at 
Vassy  spread  through  England  the  Protestant  preachers 
called  for  the  death  of  "Papists."  The  tidings  of  Dreux 
spread  panic  through  the  realm.  The  Parliament  which 
met  again  in  January  1563  showed  its  terror  by  measures 
of  a  new  severity.  There  had  been  enough  of  words,  cried 
one  of  the  Queen's  ministers,  Sir  Francis  Knollys,  "  it  was 
time  to  draw  the  sword." 

The  sword  was  drawn  in  the  first  of  a  series  of  penal 
statutes  which  weighed  upon  English  Catholics  for  two 
hundred  years.  By  this  statute  an  oath  of  allegiance  to 
the  Queen  and  of  abjuration  of  the  temporal  authority  of 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  345 

the  Pope  was  exacted  from  all  holders  of  office,  lay  or 
spiritual,  within  the  realm,  with  the  exception  of  peers. 
Its  effect  was  to  place  the  whole  power  of  the  realm  in  the 
hands  either  of  Protestants  or  of  Catholics  who  accepted 
Elizabeth's  legitimacy  and  her  ecclesiastical  jurisdiction 
in  the  teeth  of  the  Papacy.  The  oath  of  supremacy  was 
already  exacted  from  every  clergyman  and  every  member 
of  the  universities.  But  the  obligation  of  taking  it  was 
now  widely  extended.  Every  member  of  the  House  of 
Commons,  every  officer  in  the  army  or  the  fleet,  every 
schoolmaster  and  private  tutor,  every  justice  of  the  peace, 
every  municipal  magistrate,  to  whom  the  oath  was  tendered, 
was  pledged  from  this  moment  to  resist  the  blows  which 
Rome  was  threatening  to  deal.  Extreme  caution  indeed 
was  used  in  applying  this  test  to  the  laity,  but  pressure 
was  more  roughly  put  on  the  clergy.  A  great  part  of  the 
parish  priests,  though  they  had  submitted  to  the  use  of  the 
Prayer-book,  had  absented  themselves  when  called  on  to 
take  the  oath  prescribed  by  the  Act  of  Uniformity,  and  were 
known  to  be  Catholics  in  heart.  As  yet  Elizabeth  had 
cautiously  refused  to  allow  any  strict  inquiry  into  their 
opinions.  But  a  commission  was  now  opened  by  her 
order  at  Lambeth,  to  enforce  the  Act  of  Uniformity  in 
public  worship ;  while  thirty-nine  of  the  Articles  of  Faith 
drawn  up  under  Edward  the  Sixth,  which  had  till  now 
been  left  in  suspense  by  her  Government,  were  adopted  in 
Convocation  as  a  standard  of  faith,  and  acceptance  of  them 
demanded  from  all  the  clergy. 

With  the  Test  Act  and  the  establishment  of  the  High 
Commission  the  system  which  the  Queen  had  till  now 
pursued  in  great  measure  ceased.  Elizabeth  had  "  drawn 
the  sword."  It  is  possible  she  might  still  have  clung  to 
her  older  policy  had  she  foreseen  how  suddenly  the  danger 
which  appalled  her  was  to  pass  away.  At  this  crisis,  as 
ever,  she  was  able  to  "count  on  Fortune."  The  Test  Act 
was  hardly  passed  when  in  February  1563  the  Duke  of 
Guise  was  assassinated  by  a  Protestant  zealot,  and  with 


346  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

his  murder  the  whole  face  of  affairs  was  changed.  The 
Catholic  army  was  paralyzed  by  its  leader's  loss,  while 
Coligni,  who  was  now  strengthened  with  money  and 
forces  from  England,  became  master  of  Normandy.  The 
war  however  came  quietly  to  an  end;  for  Catharine  of 
Medicis  regained  her  power  on  the  Duke's  death,  and  her 
aim  was  still  an  aim  of  peace.  A  treaty  with  the  Hugue- 
nots was  concluded  in  March,  and  a  new  edict  of  Amboise 
restored  the  truce  of  religion.  Elizabeth's  luck  indeed  was 
checkered  by  a  merited  humiliation.  Now  that  peace 
was  restored  Huguenot  and  Catholic  united  to  demand 
the  surrender  of  Tours ;  and  an  outbreak  of  plague  among 
its  garrison  compelled  the  town  to  capitulate.  The  new 
strife  in  which  England  thus  found  itself  involved  with 
the  whole  realm  of  France  moved  fresh  hopes  in  Mary 
Stuart.  Mary  had  anxiously  watched  her  uncle's  progress, 
for  his  success  would  have  given  her  the  aid  of  a  Catholic 
France  in  her  projects  on  either  side  of  the  border.  But 
even  his  defeat  failed  utterly  to  dishearten  her.  The  war 
between  the  two  Queens  which  followed  it  might  well 
force  Catharine  of  Medicis  to  seek  Scottish  aid  against 
England,  and  the  Scottish  Queen  would  thus  have  secured 
that  alliance  with  a  great  power  which  the  English  Cath- 
olics demanded  before  they  would  rise  at  her  call.  At 
home  troubles  were  gathering  fast  around  her.  Veil  her 
hopes  as  she  might,  the  anxiety  with  which  she  had  fol- 
lowed the  struggle  of  her  kindred  had  not  been  lost  on  the 
Protestant  leaders,  and  it  is  probable  that  Knox  at  any 
rate  had  learned  something  of  her  secret  correspondence 
with  the  Pope  and  the  Guises.  The  Scotch  Calvinists 
were  stirred  by  the  peril  of  their  brethren  in  France,  and 
the  zeal  of  the  preachers  was  roused  by  a  revival  of  the  old 
worship  in  Clydesdale  and  by  the  neglect  of  the  Govern- 
ment to  suppress  it.  In  the  opening  of  1563  they  resolved 
"  to  put  to  their  own  hands,"  and  without  further  plaint  to 
Queen  or  Council  to  carry  out  "  the  punishment  that  God 
had  appointed  to  idolaters  in  his  law."  In  Mary's  eyes 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1602.  347 

such  a  resolve  was  rebellion.  But  her  remonstrances  only 
drew  a  more  formal  doctrine  of  resistance  from  Knox. 
"The  sword  of  justice,  madam,  is  God's,"  said  the  stern 
preacher,  "  and  is  given  to  princes  and  rulers  for  an  end ; 
which,  if  they  transgress,  they  that  in  the  fear  of  God  ex- 
ecute judgments  when  God  has  commanded  offend  not 
God.  Neither  yet  sin  they  that  bridle  kings  who  strike 
innocent  men  in  their  rage."  The  Queen  was  forced  to 
look  on  while  nearly  fifty  Catholics,  some  of  them  high 
ecclesiastics,  were  indicted  and  sent  to  prison  for  cele- 
brating mass  in  Paisley  and  Ayrshire. 

The  zeal  of  the  preachers  was  only  heightened  by  the 
coolness  of  the  Lords.  A  Scotch  Parliament  which  as- 
sembled in  the  summer  of  1563  contented  itself  with  secur- 
ing the  spoilers  in  their  possession  of  the  Church  lands, 
but  left  the  Acts  passed  in  1560  for  the  establishment  of 
Protestantism  unconfirmed  as  before.  Such  a  silence 
Knox  regarded  as  treason  to  the  faith.  He  ceased  to 
have  any  further  intercourse  with  Murray,  and  addressed 
a  burning  appeal  to  the  Lords,  "Will  ye  betray  God's 
cause  when  ye  have  it  in  your  hands  to  establish  it  as  ye 
please?  The  Queen,  ye  say,  will  not  agree  with  you.  Ask 
ye  of  her  that  which  by  God's  word  ye  may  justly  require, 
and  if  she  will  not  agree  with  ye  in  God,  ye  are  not  bound 
to  agree  with  her  in  the  devil !"  The  inaction  of  the  nobles 
proved  the  strength  which  Mary  drew  from  the  attitude  of 
France.  So  long  as  France  and  England  were  at  war,  so 
long  as  a  French  force  might  at  any  moment  be  dispatched 
to  Mary's  aid,  it  was  impossible  for  them  to  put  pressure 
on  the  Queen;  and  bold  as  was  the  action  of  the  preachers 
the  Queen  only  waited  her  opportunity  for  dealing  them  a 
fatal  blow .  But  whatever  hopes  Mary  may  have  founded  on 
the  strife,  they  were  soon  brought  to  an  end.  Catharine 
used  her  triumph  only  to  carry  out  her  system  of  balance, 
and  to  resist  the  joint  remonstrance  of  the  Pope,  the  Em- 
peror, and  the  King  of  Spain  against  her  edict  of  tolera- 
tion. The  policy  of  Elizabeth,  on  the  other  hand,  was  too 


348  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

much  identified  with  Catharine's  success  to  leave  room 
for  further  hostilities ;  and  a  treaty  of  peace  between  the 
two  countries  was  concluded  in  the  spring  of  1564. 

The  peace  with  France  marked  a  crisis  in  the  struggle 
between  the  rival  Queens.  It  left  Elizabeth  secure  against 
a  Catholic  rising  and  free  to  meet  the  pressure  from  the 
north.  But  it  dashed  the  last  hopes  of  Mary  Stuart  to  the 
ground.  The  policy  which  she  had  pursued  from  her 
landing  in  Scotland  had  proved  a  failure  in  the  end  at 
which  it  aimed.  Her  religious  toleration,  her  patience, 
her  fair  speeches,  had  failed  to  win  from  Elizabeth  a 
promise  of  the  succession.  And  meanwhile  the  Calvinism 
she  hated  was  growing  bolder  and  bolder  about  her.  The 
strife  of  religion  in  France  had  woke  a  fiercer  bigotry  in 
the  Scotch  preachers.  Knox  had  discovered  her  plans  of 
reaction,  had  publicly  denounced  her  designs  of  a  Catholic 
marriage,  and  had  met  her  angry  tears,  her  threats  of 
vengeance,  with  a  cool  defiance.  All  that  Murray's  policy 
seemed  to  have  really  done  was  to  estrange  from  her  the 
English  Catholics.  Already  alienated  from  Mary  by  her 
connection  with  France,  which  they  still  regarded  as  a 
half -heretic  power,  and  by  the  hostility  of  Philip,  in  whom 
they  trusted  as  a  pure  Catholic,  the  adherents  of  the  older 
faith  could  hardly  believe  in  the  Queen's  fidelity  to  their 
religion  when  they  saw  her  abandoning  Scotland  to  heresy 
and  holding  out  hopes  of  her  acceptance  of  the  Anglican 
creed.  Her  presence  had  roused  them  to  a  new  energy, 
and  they  were  drifting  more  and  more  as  the  strife  waxed 
warmer  abroad  to  dreams  of  forcing  on  Elizabeth  a  Cath- 
olic successor.  But  as  yet  their  hopes  turned  not  so  much 
to  Mary  Stuart  as  to  the  youth  who  stood  next  to  the  Scot- 
tish Queen  in  the  line  of  blood.  Henry  Stuart,  Lord  Darn- 
ley,  was  a  son  of  the  Countess  of  Lennox,  Margaret 
Douglas,  a  daughter  of  Margaret  Tudor  by  her  second 
marriage  with.the  Earl  of  Angus.  Lady  Lennox  was  the 
successor  whom  Mary  Tudor  would  willingly  have  chosen 
in  her  sister's  stead,  had  Philip  and  the  Parliament  suf- 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  349 

fered  her;  and  from  the  moment  of  Elizabeth's  accession 
the  Countess  had  schemed  to  drive  her  from  the  throne. 
She  offered  Philip  to  fly  with  her  boy  to  the  Low  Countries 
and  to  serve  as  a  pretender  in  his  hands.  She  intrigued 
with  the  partisans  of  the  old  religion.  Though  the  house  of 
Lennox  conformed  to  the  new  system  of  English  worship, 
its  sympathies  were  known  to  be  Catholic,  and  the  hopes 
of  the  Catholics  wrapped  themselves  round  its  heir. 
"Should  any  disaster  befall  the  Queen,"  wrote  a  Spanish 
ambassador  in  1560,  "the  Catholics  would  choose  Lord 
Darnley  for  King."  "  Not  only,"  he  adds  in  a  later  letter, 
"  would  all  sides  agree  to  choose  him  were  the  Queen  to 
die,  but  the  Catholic  Lords,  if  opportunity  offer,  may  de- 
clare for  him  at  once." 

His  strongest  rival  was  Mary  Stuart,  and  before  Mary 
landed  in  Scotland  Lady  Lennox  planned  the  union  of  both 
their  claims  by  the  marriage  of  her  son  with  the  Scottish 
Queen.  A  few  days  after  her  landing  Mary  received  a 
formal  offer  of  his  hand.  Hopes  of  yet  greater  matches, 
of  a  marriage  with  Philip's  son,  Don  Carlos,  or  with  the 
young  French  King,  Charles  the  Ninth,  had  long  held  the 
scheme  at  bay ;  but  as  these  and  her  policy  of  conciliation 
proved  alike  fruitless  Mary  turned  to  the  Lennoxes.  The 
marriage  was  probably  planned  by  David  Rizzio,  a  young 
Piedmontese  who  had  won  the  Scotch  Queen's  favor,  and 
through  whom  she  conducted  the  intrigues,  both  in  Eng- 
land and  abroad,  by  which  she  purposed  to  free  herself 
from  Murray's  power  and  to  threaten  Elizabeth.  Her 
diplomacy  was  winning  Philip  to  her  cause.  The  Spanish 
King  had  as  yet  looked  upon  Mary's  system  of  toleration 
and  on  her  hopes  from  France  with  equal  suspicion.  But 
he  now  drew  slowly  to  her  side.  Pressed  hard  in  the 
Mediterranean  by  the  Turks,  he  was  harassed  more  than 
ever  by  the  growing  discontent  of  the  Netherlands,  where 
the  triumph  of  Protestantism  in  England  and  Scotland 
and  the  power  of  the  Huguenots  in  France  gave  fresh 
vigor  to  the  growth  of  Calvinism,  and  where  the  nobles 


350  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

were  stirred  to  new  outbreaks  against  the  foreign  rule  of 
Spain  by  the  success  of  the  Scottish  Lords  in  their  rising 
and  by  the  terms  of  semi-independence  which  the  French 
nobles  wrested  from  the  Queen.  It  was  to  hold  the 
Netherlands  in  check  that  Philip  longed  for  Mary's  suc- 
cess. Her  triumph  over  Murray  and  his  confederates 
would  vindicate  the  cause  of  monarchy ;  her  triumph  over ' 
Calvinism  would  vindicate  that  of  Catholicism  both  in  her 
own  realm  and  in  the  realm  which  she  hoped  to  win.  He 
sent  her  therefore  assurances  of  his  support,  and  assur- 
ances as  strong  reached  her  from  the  Vatican.  The  dis- 
pensation which  was  secretly  obtained  for  her  marriage 
with  Darnley  was  granted  on  the  pledge  of  both  to  do 
their  utmost  for  ihe  restoration  of  the  old  religion. 

Secret  as  was  the  pledge,  the  mere  whisper  of  the  match 
revealed  their  danger  to  the  Scotch  Protestants.  The 
Lords  of  the  Congregation  woke  with  a  start  from  their 
confidence  in  the  Queen.  Murray  saw  that  the  policy  to 
which  he  had  held  his  sister  since  her  arrival  in  the  realm 
was  now  to  be  abandoned.  Mary  was  no  longer  to  be  the 
Catholic  ruler  of  a  Protestant  country,  seeking  peaceful  ac- 
knowledgment of  her  right  of  succession  to  Elizabeth's 
throne ;  she  had  placed  herself  at  the  head  of  the  English 
Catholics,  and  such  a  position  at  once  threatened  the  safety 
of  Protestantism  in  Scotland  itself.  If  once  Elizabeth 
were  overthrown  by  a  Catholic  rising,  and  a  Catholic 
policy  established  in  England,  Scotch  Protestantism  was 
at  an  end.  At  the  first  rumor  of  the  match  therefore 
Murray  drew  Argyle  and  the  Hamiltons  round  him  in  a 
band  of  self-defence,  and  refused  his  signature  to  a  paper 
recommending  Darnley  as  husband  to  the  Queen.  But 
Mary's  diplomacy  detached  from  him  lord  after  lord,  till 
his  only  hope  lay  in  the  opposition  of  Elizabeth.  The 
marriage  with  Darnley  was  undoubtedly  a  danger  even 
more  formidable  to  England  than  to  Scotland.  It  put  an 
end  to  the  dissensions  which  had  till  now  broken  the 
strength  of  the  English  Catholics.  It  rallied  them  round 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  351 

Mary  and  Darnley  as  successors  to  the  throne.  It  gathered 
to  their  cause  the  far  greater  mass  of  cautious  conserva- 
tives who  had  been  detached  from  Mary  by  her  foreign 
blood  and  by  dread  of  her  kinship  with  the  Guises.  Darn- 
ley  was  reckoned  an  Englishman,  and  with  an  English 
husband  to  sway  her  policy  Mary  herself  seemed  to  be- 
come an  Englishwoman.  But  it  was  in  vain  that  the 
Council  pronounced  the  marriage  a  danger  to  the  realm, 
that  Elizabeth  threatened  Mary  with  war,  or  that  she 
plotted  with  Murray  for  the  seizure  of  Mary  and  the  driv- 
ing Darnley  back  over  the  border.  Threat  and  plot  were 
too  late  to  avert  the  union,  and  at  the  close  of  July,  1565, 
Darnley  was  married  to  Mary  Stuart  and  proclaimed  King 
of  Scotland.  Murray  at  once  called  the  Lords  of  the  Con- 
gregation to  arms.  But  the  most  powerful  and  active 
stood  aloof.  As  heir  of  the  line  of  Angus,  Darnley  was 
by  blood  the  head  of  the  house  of  Douglas,  and  Protestants 
as  they  were,  the  Douglases  rallied  to  their  kinsman. 
Their  actual  chieftain,  the  Earl  of  Morton,  stood  next  to 
Murray  himself  in  his  power  over  the  Congregation ;  he 
was  chancellor  of  the  realm ;  and  his  strength  as  a  great 
noble  was  backed  by  a  dark  and  unscrupulous  ability.  By 
waiving  their  claim  to  the  earldom  of  Angus  and  the  lands 
which  he  held,  the  Lennoxes  won  Morton  to  his  kinsman's 
cause,  and  the  Earl  was  followed  in  his  course  by  two  of 
the  sternest  and  most  active  among  the  Protestant  Lords, 
Darnley's  uncle,  Lord  Kuthven,  and  Lord  Lindesay,  who 
had  married  a  Douglas.  Their  desertion  broke  Murray's 
strength ;  and  his  rising  was  hardly  declared  when  Mary 
marched  on  his  little  force  with  pistols  in  her  belt,  and 
drove  its  leaders  over  the  border. 

The  work  which  Elizabeth  had  done  in  Scotland  had 
been  undone  in .  an  hour.  Murray  was  a  fugitive.  The 
Lords  of  the  Congregation  were  broken  or  dispersed.  The 
English  party  was  ruined.  And  while  Scotland  was  lost 
it  seemed  as  if  the  triumph  of  Mary  was  a  signal  for  the 
general  revival  of  Catholicism.  The  influence  of  the 


352  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PfiOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

Guises  had  again  become  strong  in  Franee,  and  though 
Catherine  of  Medici  held  firmly  to  her  policy  of  tolera- 
tion, an  interview  which  she  held  with  Alva  at  Bayonne 
led  every  Protestant  to  believe  in  the  conclusion  of  a  league 
between  France  and  Spain  for  a  common  war  on  Protestant- 
ism. To  this  league  the  English  statesmen  held  that  Mary 
Stuart  had  become  a  party,  and  her  pressure  upon  Eliza- 
beth was  backed  by  the  suspicion  that  the  two  great  mon- 
archies had  pledged  her  their  support.  No  such  league 
existed,  nor  had  such  a  pledge  been  given,  but  the  dread 
served  Mary's  purpose  as  well  as  the  reality  could  have 
done.  Girt  in,  as  she  believed,  with  foes,  Elizabeth  took 
refuge  in  the  meanest  dissimulation,  while  Mary  Stuart 
imperiously  demanded  a  recognition  of  her  succession  as 
the  price  of  peace.  But  her  aims  went  far  beyond  this 
demand.  She  found  herself  greeted  at  Rome  as  the 
champion  of  the  Faith.  Pius  the  Fifth,  who  mounted  the 
Papal  throne  at  the  moment  of  her  success,  seized  on  the 
young  Queen  to  strike  the  first  blow  in  the  crusade  against 
Protestantism  on  which  he  was  set.  He  promised  her 
troops  and  money.  He  would  support  her,  he  said,  so 
long  as  he  had  a  single  chalice  to  sell.  "  With  the  help  of 
God  and  your  Holiness,"  Mary  wrote  back,  "I  will  leap 
over  the  wall."  In  England  itself  the  marriage  and  her 
new  attitude  rallied  every  Catholic  to  Mary's  standard; 
and  the  announcement  of  her  pregnancy  which  followed 
gave  her  a  strength  that  swept  aside  Philip's  counsels  of 
caution  and  delay.  The  daring  advice  of  Rizzio  fell  in 
with  her  natural  temper.  She  resolved  to  restore  Cathol- 
icism in  Scotland.  Yield  as  she  might  to  Murray's 
pressure,  she  had  dextrously  refrained  from  giving  legal 
confirmation  to  the  resolutions  of  the  Parliament  by  which 
Calvinism  had  been  set  up  in  Scotland ;  and  in  the  Parlia- 
ment which  she  summoned  for  the  coming  spring  she 
trusted  to  do  "  some  good  anent  restoring  the  old  religion." 
The  appearance  of  the  Catholic  lords,  the  Earls  of  Huntly, 
Athol,  and  Both  well,  at  Mary's  court  showed  her  purpose 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  353 

to  attempt  this  religious  revolution.  Nor  were  her  polit- 
ical schemes  less  resolute.  She  was  determined  to  wring 
from  the  coming  Parliament  a  confirmation  of  the  banish- 
ment of  the  lords  who  had  fled  with  Murray  which  would 
free  her  forever  from  the  pressure  of  the  Protestant  nobles. 
Mistress  of  her  kingdom,  politically  as  well  as  religiously, 
Mary  could  put  a  pressure  on  Elizabeth  which  might  win 
for  her  more  than  an  acknowledgment  of  her  right  to  the 
succession.  She  still  clung  to  her  hopes  of  the  crown ;  and 
she  knew  that  the  Catholics  of  Northumberland  and  York- 
shire were  ready  to  revolt  as  soon  as  she  was  ready  to  aid 
them. 

No  such  danger  had  ever  threatened  Elizabeth  as  this. 
But  again  she  could  "  trust  to  fortune. "  Mary  had  staked 
all  on  her  union  with  Darnley,  and  yet  only  a  few  months 
had  passed  since  her  wedding-day  when  men  saw  that  she 
"  hated  the  King. "  The  boy  turned  out  a  dissolute,  insolent 
husband;  and  Mary's  scornful  refusal  of  his  claim  of  the 
"crown  matrimonial,"  which  would  have  given  him  an 
equal  share  of  the  royal  power  with  herself,  widened  the 
breach  between  them.  Darnley  attributed  this  refusal  to 
Rizzio's  counsels;  and  his  father,  Lord  Lennox,  joined 
with  him  in  plotting  vengeance  against  the  minister. 
They  sought  aid  from  the  very  party  whom  Darnley's 
marriage  had  been  planned  to  crush.  Though  the  strength 
of  the  Protestant  nobles  had  been  broken  by  the  flight  of 
Murray,  the  Douglases  remained  at  the  court.  Morton  had 
no  purpose  of  lending  himself  to  the  ruin  of  the  religion  he 
professed,  and  Ruthven  and  Lindesay  were  roused  to  action 
when  they  saw  themselves  threatened  with  a  restoration  of 
Catholicism,  and  with  a  legal  banishment  of  Murray  and 
his  companions  in  the  coming  Parliament,  which  could 
only  serve  as  a  prelude  to  their  own  ruin.  Rizzio  was  the 
author  of  this  policy;  and  when  Darnley  called  on  his 
kinsmen  to  aid  him  in  attacking  Rizzio,  the  Douglases 
grasped  at  his  proposal.  Their  aid  and  their  promise  of 
the  crown  matrimonial  was  bought  by  Darnley's  consent 


354  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [Boos  VI. 

to  the  recall  of  the  fugitive  lords  and  of  Murray.  The  plot 
of  the  Douglases  was  so  jealously  hidden  that  no  whisper 
of  it  reached  the  Queen.  Her  plans  were  on  the  brink  of 
success.  The  Catholic  nobles  were  ready  for  action  at  her 
court.  Huntly  and  Bothwell  were  called  into  the  Privy 
Council.  At  the  opening  of  March,  1566,  the  Parliament 
which  was  to  carry  out  her  projects  was  to  assemble ;  and 
the  Queen  prepared  for  her  decisive  stroke  by  naming  men 
whom  she  could  trust  as  Lords  of  the  Articles— a  body 
with  whom  lay  the  proposal  of  measures  to  the  Houses — 
and  by  restoring  the  bishops  to  their  old  places  among  the 
peers.  But  at  the  moment  when  Mary  revealed  the  extent 
of  her  schemes  by  her  dismissal  of  the  English  ambassador, 
the  young  King,  followed  by  Lord  Ruthven,  burst  into  her 
chamber,  dragged  Rizzio  from  her  presence,  and  stabbed 
him  in  an  outer  chamber,  while  Morton  and  Lord  Lindesay 
with  their  followers  seized  the  palace  gate.  Mary  found 
herself  a  prisoner  in  the  hands  of  her  husband  and  his  con- 
federates. Her  plans  were  wrecked  in  an  hour.  A  procla- 
mation of  the  King  dissolved  the  Parliament  which  she 
had  called  for  the  ruin  of  her  foes;  and  Murray,  who  was 
on  his  way  back  from  England  when  the  deed  was  done, 
was  received  at  Court  and  restored  to  his  old  post  at  the 
Council-board . 

Terrible  as  the  blow  had  been,  it  roused  the  more  ter- 
rible energies  which  lay  hid  beneath  the  graceful  bearing 
of  the  Queen.  The  darker  features  of  her  character  were 
now  to  develop  themselves.  With  an  inflexible  will  she 
turned  to  build  up  again  the  policy  which  seemed  shattered 
in  Rizzio's  murder.  Her  passionate  resentment  bent  to  the 
demands  of  her  ambition.  "No  more  tears,"  she  said 
when  they  brought  her  news  of  Rizzio's  murder;  "I  will 
think  upon  revenge."  But  even  revenge  was  not  suffered 
to  interfere  with  her  political  schemes.  Keen  as  was 
Mary's  thirst  for  vengeance  on  him,  Darnley  was  needful 
to  the  triumph  of  her  aims,  and  her  first  effort  was  to  win 
him  back.  He  was  already  grudging  at  the  supremacy  of 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  355 

the  nobles  and  his  virtual  exclusion  from  power,  when 
Mary  masking  her  hatred  beneath  a  show  of  affection  suc- 
ceeded in  severing  the  wretched  boy  from  his  fellow-con- 
spirators, and  in  gaining  his  help  in  an  escape  to  Dunbar. 
Once  free,  a  force  of  eight  thousand  men  under  the  Earl 
of  Bothwell  quickly  gathered  round  her,  and  with  these 
troops  she  marched  in  triumph  on  Edinburgh.  An  offer 
of  pardon  to  all  save  those  concerned  in  Rizzio's  murder 
broke  up  the  force  of  the  Lords ;  Glencairn  and  Argyle 
joined  the  Queen,  while  Morton,  Ruthven,  and  Lindesay 
fled  in  terror  over  the  border.  But  Mary  had  learned  by  a 
terrible  lesson  the  need  of  dissimulation.  She  made  no 
show  of  renewing  her  Catholic  policy.  On  the  contrary, 
she  affected  to  resume  the  system  which  she  had  pursued 
from  the  opening  of  her  reign,  and  suffered  Murray  to  re- 
main at  the  court.  Rizzio's  death  had  in  fact  strengthened 
her  position.  With  him  passed  away  the  dread  of  a  Cath- 
olic reaction.  Mary's  toleration,  her  pledges  of  extending 
an  equal  indulgence  to  Protestantism  in  England,  should 
she  mount  its  throne,  her  marriage  to  one  who  was  looked 
upon  as  an  English  noble,  above  all  the  hope  of  realizing 
through  her  succession  the  dream  of  a  union  of  the  realms, 
again  told  on  the  wavering  body  of  more  Conservative 
statesmen,  like  Norfolk,  and  even  drew  to  her  side  some  of 
the  steadier  Protestants  who  despaired  of  a  Protestant  suc- 
cession. Even  Elizabeth  at  last  seemed  wavering  toward 
a  recognition  of  her  as  her  successor.  But  Mary  aimed  at 
more  than  the  succession.  Her  intrigues  with  the  English 
Catholics  were  never  interrupted.  Her  seeming  reconcilia- 
tion with  the  young  King  preserved  that  union  of  the  whole 
Catholic  body  which  her  marriage  had  brought  about  and 
which  the  strife  over  Rizzio  threatened  with  ruin.  Her 
court  was  full  of  refugees  from  the  northern  counties. 
"Your  actions,"  Elizabeth  wrote  in  a  sudden  break  of 
fierce  candor,  "  are  as  full  of  venom  as  your  words  are  of 
honey."  Fierce  words  however  did  nothing  to  break  the 
clouds  that  gathered  thicker  and  thicker  round  England : 


356  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

and  in  June  the  birth  of  a  boy,  the  future  James  the  Sixth 
of  Scotland  and  First  of  England,  doubled  Mary's  strength. 
Elizabeth  felt  bitterly  the  blow.  "The  Queen  of  Scots," 
she  cried,  "has  a  fair  son,  and  I  am  but  a  barren  stock." 
The  birth  of  James  in  fact  seemed  to  settle  the  long  strug- 
gle in  Mary's  favor.  The  moderate  Conservatives  joined 
the  ranks  of  her  adherents.  The  Catholics  were  wild  with 
hope.  "Your  friends  are  so  increased,"  her  ambassador, 
Melville,  wrote  to  her  from  England,  "  that  many  whole 
shires  are  ready  to  rebel,  and  their  captains  named  by 
election  of  the  nobility."  On  the  other  hand,  the  Protes- 
tants were  filled  with  despair.  It  seemed  as  if  no  effort 
could  avert  the  rule  of  England  by  a  Catholic  Queen. 

It  was  at  this  moment  of  peril  that  the  English  Parlia- 
ment was  again  called  together.  Its  action  showed  more 
than  the  natural  anxiety  of  the  time ;  it  showed  the  growth 
of  those  national  forces  which  far  more  than  the  schemes 
of  Mary  or  the  counter-schemes  of  Elizabeth  were  to  de- 
termine the  future  of  England.  While  the  two  queens 
were  heaping  intrigue  on  intrigue,  while  abroad  and  at 
home  every  statesman  held  firmly  that  national  welfare  or 
national  misery  hung  on  the  fortune  of  the  one  or  the  suc- 
cess of  the  other,  the  English  people  itself  was  steadily 
moving  forward  to  a  new  spiritual  enlightenment  and  a 
new  political  liberty.  '  The  intellectual  and  religious  im- 
pulses of  the  age  were  already  combining  with  the  influ- 
ence of  its  growing  wealth  to  revive  a  spirit  of  indepen- 
dence in  the  nation  at  large.  It  was  impossible  for  Eliza- 
beth to  understand  this  spirit,  but  her  wonderful  tact 
enabled  her  from  the  first  to  feel  the  strength  of  it.  Long 
before  any  open  conflict  arose  between  the  people  and  the 
Crown  we  see  her  instinctive  perception  of  the  changes 
which  were  going  on  around  her  in  the  modifications, 
conscious  or  unconscious,  which  she  introduced  into  the 
system  of  the  monarchy.  Of  its  usurpations  upon  English 
liberty  she  abandoned  none.  But  she  curtailed  and  softened 
down  almost  all.  She  tampered,  as  her  predecessors  had 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  357 

tampered,  with  personal  freedom;  there  was  the  same 
straining  of  statutes  and  coercion  of  juries  in  political 
trials  as  before,  and  an  arbitrary  power  of  imprisonment 
was  still  exercised  by  the  Council.  The  duties  she  imposed 
on  cloth  and  sweet  wines  were  an  assertion  of  her  right  of 
arbitrary  taxation.  Proclamations  in  Council  constantly 
assumed  the  force  of  law.  But,  boldly  as  it  was  asserted, 
the  royal  power  was  practically  wielded  with  a  caution  and 
moderation  that  showed  the  sense  of  a  growing  difficulty 
in  the  full  exercise  of  it.  The  ordinary  course  of  justice 
was  left  undisturbed.  The  jurisdiction  of  the  Council  was 
asserted  almost  exclusively  over  the  Catholics;  and  de- 
fended in  their  case  as  a  precaution  against  pressing  dan- 
gers. The  proclamations  issued  were  temporary  in  char- 
acter and  of  small  importance.  The  two  duties  imposed 
were  so  slight  as  to  pass  almost  unnoticed  in  the  general 
satisfaction  at  Elizabeth's  abstinence  from  internal  taxa- 
tion. She  abandoned  the  benevolences  and  forced  loans 
which  had  brought  home  the  sense  of  tyranny  to  the  sub- 
jects of  her  predecessors.  She  treated  the  Privy  Seals, 
which  on  emergencies  she  issued  for  advances  to  her  Ex- 
chequer, simply  as  anticipations  of  her  revenue  (like  our 
own  Exchequer  Bills),  and  punctually  repaid  them.  The 
monopolies  with  which  she  fettered  trade  proved  a  more 
serious  grievance ;  but  during  her  earlier  reign  they  were 
looked  on  as  a  part  of  the  system  of  Merchant  Associations, 
which  were  at  that  time  regarded  as  necessary  for  the 
regulation  and  protection  of  the  growing  commerce. 

The  political  development  of  the  nation  is  seen  still  more 
in  the  advance  of  the  Parliament  during  Elizabeth's  reign. 
The  Queen's  thrift  enabled  her  in  ordinary  times  of  poace 
to  defray  the  current  expenses  of  the  Crown  from  its  ordi- 
nary revenues.  But  her  thrift  was  dictated  not  so  much 
by  economy  as  by  a  desire  to  avoid  summoning  fresh 
Parliaments.  We  have  seen  how  boldly  the  genius  of 
Thomas  Cromwell  set  aside  on  this  point  the  tradition  of 
the  New  Monarchy.  His  confidence  in  the  power  of  the 


358  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

Crown  revived  the  Parliament  as  an  easy  and  manageable 
instrument  of  tyranny.  The  old  forms  of  constitutional 
freedom  were  turned  to  the  profit  of  the  royal  despotism, 
and  a  revolution  which  for  the  moment  left  England  ab- 
solutely at  Henry's  feet  was  wrought  out  by  a  series  of 
parliamentary  statutes.  Throughout  Henry's  reign  Crom- 
well's confidence  was  justified  by  the  spirit  of  slavish  sub- 
mission which  pervaded  the  Houses.  But  the  effect  of  the 
religious  change  for  which  his  measures  made  room  began 
to  be  felt  during  the  minority  of  Edward  the  Sixth ;  and 
the  debates  and  divisions  on  the  religious  reaction  which 
Mary  pressed  on  the  Parliament  were  many  and  violent. 
A  great  step  forward  was  marked  by  the  effort  of  the 
Crown  to  neutralize  by  "management"  an  opposition 
which  it  could  no  longer  overawe.  Not  only  was  the  Par- 
liament packed  with  nominees  of  the  Crown  but  new  con- 
stituencies were  created  whose  members  would  follow 
implicitly  its  will.  For  this  purpose  twenty-two  new 
boroughs  were  created  under  Edward,  fourteen  under 
Mary;  some,  indeed,  places  entitled  to  representation  by 
their  wealth  and  population,  but  the  bulk  of  them  small 
towns  or  hamlets  which  lay  wholly  at  the  disposal  of  the 
Koyal  Council. 

Elizabeth  adopted  the  system  of  her  two  predecessors 
both  in  the  creation  of  boroughs  and  the  recommendation 
of  candidates ;  but  her  keen  political  instinct  soon  perceived 
the  inutility  of  both  expedients.  She  saw  that  the  "  man- 
agement" of  the  Houses,  so  easy  under  Cromwell,  was  be- 
coming harder  every  day.  The  very  number  of  the  mem- 
bers she  called  up  into  the  Commons  from  nomination 
boroughs,  sixty-two  in  all,  showed  the  increasing  difficulty 
which  the  government  found  in  securing  a  working  major- 
ity. The  rise  of  a  new  nobility  enriched  by  the  spoils  of 
the  Church  and  trained  to  political  life  by  the  stress  of 
events  around  them  was  giving  fresh  vigor  to  the  House 
of  Lords.  The  increased  wealth  of  the  country  gentry  as 
well  aa  the  growing  desire  to  obtain  a  seat  among  the 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1608.  359 

Commons  brought  about  the  cessation  at  this  time  of  the 
old  payment  of  members  by  their  constituencies.  A 
change  too  in  the  borough  representation,  which  had  long 
been  in  progress  but  was  now  for  the  first  time  legally 
recognized,  tended  greatly  to  increase  the  vigor  and  inde- 
pendence of  the  Lower  House.  By  the  terms  of  the  older 
writs  borough  members  were  required  to  be  chosen  from 
the  body  of  the  burgesses ;  and  an  act  of  Henry  the  Fifth 
gave  this  custom  the  force  of  law.  But  the  passing  of  such 
an  act  shows  that  the  custom  was  already  widely  infringed, 
and  by  Elizabeth's  day  act  and  custom  alike  had  ceased  to 
have  force.  Most  seats  were  now  filled  by  representatives 
who  were  strange  to  the  borough  itself,  and  who  were  often 
nominees  of  the  great  landowners  round.  But  they  were 
commonly  men  of  wealth  and  blood  whose  aim  in  entering 
parliament  was  a  purely  political  one,  and  whose  attitude 
toward  the  Crown  was  far  bolder  and  more  independent 
than  that  of  the  quiet  tradesmen  who  preceded  them. 
Elizabeth  saw  that  "  management"  was  of  little  avail  with 
a  house  of  members  such  as  these;  and  she  fell  back  as  far 
as  she  could  on  Wolsey's  policy  of  practical  abolition.  She 
summoned  Parliaments  at  longer  and  longer  intervals. 
By  rigid  economy,  by  a  policy  of  balance  and  peace,  she 
strove,  and  for  a  long  time  successfully  strove,  to  avoid 
the  necessity  of  assembling  them  at  all.  But  Mary  of 
Scotland  and  Philip  of  Spain  proved  friends  to  English 
liberty  in  its  sorest  need.  The  struggle  with  Catholicism 
forced  Elizabeth  to  have  more  frequent  recourse  to  her 
Parliaments,  and  as  she  was  driven  to  appeal  for  increas- 
ing supplies  the  tone  of  the  Houses  rose  higher  and  higher. 
What  made  this  revival  of  Parliamentary  independence 
more  important  was  the  range  which  Cromwell's  policy 
had  given  to  Parliamentary  action.  In  theory  the  Tudor 
statesman  regarded  three  cardinal  subjects,  matters  of 
trade,  matters  of  religion,  and  matters  of  State,  as  lying 
exclusively  within  the  competence  of  the  Crown.  But  in 

actual  fact  such  subjects  had  been  treated  by  Parliament 

16  YOL.  2 


360  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

after  Parliament.  The  whole  religious  fabric  of  the  realm 
rested  on  Parliamentary  enactments.  The  very  title  of 
Elizabeth  rested  in  a  Parliamentary  statute.  When  the 
Houses  petitioned  at  the  outset  of  her  reign  for  the  declara- 
tion of  a  successor  and  for  the  Queen's  marriage  it  was 
impossible  for  her  to  deny  their  right  to  intermeddle  with 
these  "matters  of  State,"  though  she  rebuked  the  demand 
and  evaded  an  answer.  But  the  question  of  the  succession 
was  a  question  too  vital  for  English  freedom  and  English 
religion  to  remain  prisoned  within  Elizabeth's  council- 
chamber.  It  came  again  to  the  front  in  the  Parliament 
which  the  pressure  from  Mary  Stuart  forced  Elizabeth  to 
assemble  after  six  prorogations  and  an  interval  of  four 
years  in  September,  1566.  The  Lower  House  at  once  re- 
solved that  the  business  of  supply  should  go  hand  in  hand 
with  that  of  the  succession.  Such  a  step  put  a  stress  on 
the  monarchy  which  it  had  never  known  since  the  War  of 
the  Roses.  The  Commons  no  longer  confined  themselves 
to  limiting  or  resisting  the  policy  of  the  Crown;  they 
dared  to  dictate  it.  Elizabeth's  wrath  showed  her  sense 
of  the  importance  of  their  action.  "  They  had  acted  like 
rebels !"  she  said ;  "  they  had  dealt  with  her  as  they  dared 
not  have  dealt  with  her  father."  "I  cannot  tell,"  she 
broke  out  angrily  to  the  Spanish  ambassador,  "  what  these 
devils  want!"  "They  want  liberty,  madam,"  replied  the 
Spaniard,  "  and  if  princes  do  not  look  to  themselves  and 
work  together  to  put  such  people  down  they  will  find  be- 
fore long  what  all  this  is  coming  to !"  But  Elizabeth  had 
to  front  more  than  her  Puritan  Commons.  The  Lords 
joined  with  the  Lower  House  in  demanding  the  Queen's 
marriage  and  a  settlement  of  the  succession,  and  after  a 
furious  burst  of  anger  Elizabeth  gave  a  promise  of  marriage, 
which  she  was  no  doubt  resolved  to  evade  as  she  had 
evaded  it  before.  But  the  subject  of  the  succession  was 
one  which  could  not  be  evaded.  Yet  any  decision  on  it 
meant  civil  war.  It  was  notorious  that  if  the  Commons 
were  resolute  to  name  the  Lady  Catharine  Grey,  the  heiress 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1808.  361 

of  the  House  of  Suffolk,  successor  to  the  throne,  the  Lords 
were  as  resolute  to  assert  the  right  of  Mary  Stuart.  To 
settle  such  a  matter  was  at  once  to  draw  the  sword.  The 
Queen  therefore  peremptorily  forbade  the  subject  to  be  ap- 
proached. But  the  royal  message  was  no  sooner  delivered 
than  Wentworth,  a  member  of  the  House  of  Commons, 
rose  to  ask  whether  such  a  prohibition  was  not  "  against 
the  liberties  of  Parliament."  The  question  was  followed 
by  a  hot  debate,  and  a  fresh  message  from  the  Queen 
commanding  "  that  there  should  be  no  further  argument" 
was  met  by  a  request  for  freedom  of  deliberation  while  the 
subsidy  bill  lay  significantly  unnoticed  on  the  table.  A 
new  strife  broke  out  when  another  member  of  the  Com- 
mons, Mr.  Dalton,  denounced  the  claims  put  forward  by 
the  Scottish  Queen.  Elizabeth  at  once  ordered  him  into 
arrest.  But  the  Commons  prayed  for  leave  "to  confer 
upon  their  liberties,"  and  the  Queen's  prudence  taught  her 
that  it  was  necessary  to  give  way.  She  released  Dalton ; 
she  protested  to  the  Commons  that  "  she  did  not  mean~  to 
prejudice  any  part  of  the  liberties  heretofore  granted  them ;" 
she  softened  the  order  of  silence  into  a  request.  Won  by 
the  graceful  concession,  the  Lower  House  granted  the  sub- 
sidy and  assented  loyally  to  her  wish.  But  the  victory  was 
none  the  less  a  real  one.  No  such  struggle  had  taken  place 
between  the  Crown  and  the  Commons  since  the  beginning 
of  the  New  Monarchy ;  and  the  struggle  had  ended  in  the 
virtual  defeat  of  the  Crown. 

The  strife  with  the  Parliament  hit  Elizabeth  hard.  It 
was  "  secret  foes  at  home,"  she  told  the  House  as  the  quar- 
rel passed  away  in  a  warm  reconciliation,  "  who  thought 
to  work  me  that  mischief  which  never  foreign  enemies 
could  bring  to  pass,  which  is  the  hatred  of  my  Commons. 
Do  you  think  that  either  I  am  so  unmindful  of  your  surety 
by  succession,  wherein  is  all  my  care,  or  that  I  went  about 
to  break  your  liberties?  No!  it  never  was  my  meaning; 
but  to  stay  you  before  you  fell  into  the  ditch."  But  it  was 
impossible  for  her  to  explain  the  real  reasons  for  her  course, 


362  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

and  the  dissolution  of  the  Parliament  in  January,  1567, 
left  her  face  to  face  with  a  national  discontent  added  to  the 
ever-deepening  peril  from  without.  To  the  danger  from 
the  north  and  from  the  east  was  added  a  danger  from  the 
west.  The  north  of  Ireland  was  in  full  revolt.  From  the 
moment  of  her  accession  Elizabeth  had  realized  the  risks 
of  the  policy  of  confiscation  and  colonization  which  had 
been  pursued  in  the  island  by  her  predecessor:  and  the 
prudence  of  Cecil  fell  back  on  the  safer  though  more  tedi- 
ous policy  of  Henry  the  Eighth.  But  the  alarm  at  English 
aggression  had  already  spread  among  the  natives ;  and  its 
result  was  seen  in  a  revolt  of  the  north,  and  in  the  rise  of 
a  leader  more  vigorous  and  able  than  any  with  whom  the 
Government  had  had  as  yet  to  contend.  An  acceptance 
of  the  Earldom  of  Tyrone  by  the  chief  of  the  O'Neills 
brought  about  the  inevitable  conflict  between  the  system  of 
succession  recognized  by  English  and  that  recognized  by 
Irish  law.  On  the  death  of  the  Earl  of  Tyrone  England 
acknowledged  his  eldest  son  as  the  heir  of  his  Earldom ; 
while  the  sept  of  which  he  was  the  head  maintained  their 
older  right  of  choosing  a  chief  from  among  the  members 
of  the  family,  and  preferred  Shane  O'Neill,  a  younger 
son  of  less  doubtful  legitimacy.  The  Lord  Deputy,  the 
Earl  of  Sussex,  marched  northward  to  settle  the  question 
by  force  of  arms ;  but  ere  he  could  reach  Ulster  the  activ- 
ity of  Shane  had  quelled  the  disaffection  of  his  rivals,  the 
O'Donnells  of  Donegal,  and  won  over  the  Scots  of  Antrim. 
"Never  before,"  wrote  Sussex,  "durst  Scot  or  Irishman 
look  Englishman  in  the  face  in  plain  or  wood  since  I  came 
here ;"  but  Shane  fired  his  men  with  a  new  courage,  and 
charging  the  Deputy's  army  with  a  force  hardly  half  its 
number  drove  it  back  in  rout  on  Armagh.  A  promise  of 
pardon  induced  the  Irish  chieftain  to  visit  London,  and 
make  an  illusory  submission,  but  he  was  no  sooner  safe 
home  again  than  its  terms  were  set  aside;  and  after  a 
wearisome  struggle,  in  which  Shane  foiled  the  efforts  of 
the  Lord  Deputy  to  entrap  or  to  poison  him,  he  remained 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  363 

virtually  master  of  the  north.  His  success  stirred  larger 
dreams  of  ambition.  He  invaded  Connaught,  and  pressed 
Clanrickard  hard ;  while  he  replied  to  the  remonstrances 
of  the  Council  at  Dublin  with  a  bold  defiance.  "  By  the 
sword  I  have  won  these  lands,"  he  answered,  "and  by  the 
sword  will  I  keep  them."  But  defiance  broke  idly  against 
the  skill  and  vigor  of  Sir  Henry  Sidney,  who  succeeded 
Sussex  as  Lord  Deputy.  The  rival  septs  of  the  north  were 
drawn  into  a  rising  against  O'Neill,  while  the  English 
army  advanced  from  the  Pale;  and  in  1567  Shane,  defeated 
by  the  O'Donnells,  took  refuge  in  Antrim,  and  was  hewn 
to  pieces  in  a  drunken  squabble  by  his  Scottish  enter- 
tainers. 

The  victory  of  Sidney  marked  the  turn  of  the  tide  which 
had  run  so  long  against  Elizabeth.  The  danger  which 
England  dreaded  from  Mary  Stuart,  the  terror  of  a  Catholic 
sovereign  and  a  Catholic  reaction,  reached  its  height 
only  to  pass  irretrievably  away.  At  the  moment  when 
the  Irish  revolt  was  being  trampled  under  foot  a  terrible 
event  suddenly  struck  light  through  the  gathering  clouds 
in  the  north.  Mary  had  used  Darnley  as  a  tool  to  bring 
about  the  ruin  of  his  confederates  and  to  further  her  policy ; 
but  from  the  moment  that  she  discovered  his  actual  com- 
plicity in  the  plot  for  Rizzio's  murder  she  had  loathed  and 
avoided  him.  Ominous  words  dropped  from  her  lips. 
"  Unless  she  were  free  of  him  some  way,"  Mary  was 
heard  to  mutter,  "  she  had  no  pleasure  to  live."  The  lords 
whom  he  had  drawn  into  his  plot  only  to  desert  and  betray 
them  hated  him  with  as  terrible  a  hatred,  and  in  their 
longing  for  vengeance  a  new  adventurer  saw  the  road  to 
power.  Of  all  the  border  nobles  James  Hepburn,  the  Earl 
of  Bothwell,  was  the  boldest  and  the  most  unscrupulous. 
But,  Protestant  as  he  was,  he  had  never  swerved  from  the 
side  of  the  Crown;  he  had  supported  the  Regent,  and 
crossed  the  seas  to  pledge  as  firm  a  support  to  Mary ;  and 
his  loyalty  and  daring  alike  appealed  to  the  young  Queen's 
heart.  Little  as  he  was  touched  by  Mary's  passion,  it 


364  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

stirred  in  the  Earl  dreams  of  a  union  with  the  Queen;  and 
great  as  were  the  obstacles  to  such  a  union  which  presented 
themselves  in  Mary's  marriage  and  his  own,  Bothwell  was 
of  too  desperate  a  temper  to  recoil  before  obstacles  such  as 
these.  Divorce  would  free  him  from  his  own  wife.  To 
free  himself  from  Darnley  he  seized  on  the  hatred  which 
the  lords  whom  Darnley  had  deserted  and  betrayed  bore 
to  the  King.  Bothwell  joined  Murray  and  the  English 
ambassador  in  praying  for  the  recall  of  Morton  and  the 
exiles.  The  pardon  was  granted;  the  nobles  returned  to 
court,  and  the  bulk  of  them  joined  readily  in  a  conspiracy 
to  strike  down  one  whom  they  still  looked  on  as  their  bit- 
terest foe. 

Morton  alone  stood  aloof.  He  demanded  an  assurance 
of  the  Queen's  sanction  to  the  deed ;  and  no  such  assurance 
was  given  him.  On  the  contrary  Mary's  mood  seemed 
suddenly  to  change.  Her  hatred  to  Darnley  passed  all  at 
once  into  demonstration  of  the  old  affection.  He  had 
fallen  sick  with  vice  and  misery,  and  she  visited  him  on 
his  sick-bed,  and  persuaded  him  to  follow  her  to  Edin- 
burgh. She  visited  him  again  in  a  ruinous  and  lonely 
house  near  the  palace  in  which  he  was  lodged  by  her  order, 
on  the  ground  that  its  pare  air  would  further  his  recovery, 
kissed  him  as  she  bade  him  farewell,  and  rode  gayly  back 
to  a  wedding-dance  at  Holyrood.  If  Mary's  passion  had 
drawn  her  to  share  Bothwell 's  guilt,  these  acts  were  but 
awful  preludes  to  her  husband's  doom.  If  on  the  other 
hand  her  reconciliation  was  a  real  one,  it  only  drove  Both- 
well  to  hurry  on  his  deed  of  blood  without  waiting  for  the 
aid  of  the  nobles  who  had  sworn  the  King's  death.  The 
terrible  secret  is  still  hid  in  a  cloud  of  doubt  and  mystery 
which  will  probably  never  be  wholly  dispelled.  But  Mary 
had  hardly  returned  to  her  palace  when,  two  hours  after 
midnight  on  the  ninth  of  February,  1567,  an  awful  ex- 
plosion shook  the  city.  The  burghers  rushed  out  from  the 
gates  to  find  the  house  of  Kirk  o'  Field  destroyed  and 
Darnley's  body  dead  beside  the  ruins. 


CHAP.  4.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  365 

The  murder  was  undoubtedly  the  deed  of  Both  well.  It 
was  soon  known  that  his  servant  had  stored  the  powder 
beneath  the  King's  bed-chamber  and  that  the  Earl  had 
watched  without  the  walls  till  the  deed  was  done.  But, 
in  spite  of  gathering  suspicion  and  of  a  charge  of  murder 
made  formally  against  Bothwell  by  Lord  Lennox  no  seri- 
ous steps  were  taken  to  investigate  the  crime ;  and  a  rumor 
that  Mary  purposed  to  marry  the  murderer  drove  her 
friends  to  despair.  Her  agent  in  England  wrote  to  her 
that  "  if  she  married  that  man  she  would  lose  the  favor  of 
God,  her  own  reputation,  and  the  hearts  of  all  England, 
Ireland,  and  Scotland."  But  whatever  may  have  been  the 
ties  of  passion  or  guilt  which  united  them,  Mary  was  now 
powerless  in  Bothwell's  hands.  While  Murray  withdrew 
to  France  on  pretext  of  travel,  the  young  Earl  used  the 
plot  against  Darnley  into  which  he  had  drawn  the  lords  to 
force  from  them  a  declaration  that  he  was  guiltless  of  the 
murder  and  their  consent  to  his  marriage  with  the  Queen. 
He  boasted  that  he  would  marry  Mary,  whether  she  would 
or  no.  Every  stronghold  in  the  kingdom  was  placed  in 
his  hands,  and  this  step  was  the  prelude  to  a  trial  and 
acquittal  which  the  overwhelming  force  of  his  followers 
in  Edinburgh  turned  into  a  bitter  mockery.  The  Protes- 
tants were  bribed  by  the  assembling  of  a  Parliament  in 
which  Mary  for  the  first  time  gave  her  sanction  to  the  laws 
which  established  the  reformation  in  Scotland.  A  shame- 
less suit  for  his  divorce  removed  the  last  obstacle  to  Both- 
well's ambition ;  and  a  seizure  of  the  Queen  as  she  rode  to 
Linlithgow,  whether  real  or  fictitious,  was  followed  three 
weeks  later  by  their  union  on  the  fifteenth  of  May.  Mary 
may  have  yielded  to  force;  she  may  have  yielded  to  pas- 
sion ;  it  is  possible  that  in  Bothwell's  vigor  she  saw  the 
means  of  at  last  mastering  the  kingdom  and  wreaking  her 
vengeance  on  the  lords.  But  whatever  were  her  hopes  or 
fears,  in  a  month  more  all  was  over.  The  horror  at  the 
Queen's  marriage  with  a  man  fresh  from  her  husband's 
blood  drove  the  whole  nation  to  revolt.  The  Catholic 


366  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

party  held  aloof  from  a  Queen  who  seemed  to  have  for- 
saken them  by  a  Protestant  marriage  and  by  her  acknowl- 
edgment of  the  Protestant  Church.  The  Protestant  lords 
seized  on  the  general  horror  to  free  themselves  from  a 
master  whose  subtlety  and  bloodshed  had  placed  them  at 
his  feet.  Morton  and  Argyle  rallied  the  forces  of  the  Con- 
gregation at  Stirling,  and  were  soon  joined  by  the  bulk  of 
the  Scottish  nobles  of  either  religion.  Their  entrance  into 
Edinburgh  roused  the  capital  into  insurrection.  On  the 
fifteenth  of  June  Mary  and  her  husband  advanced  with  a 
fair  force  to  Seton  to  encounter  the  Lords ;  but  their  men 
refused  to  fight,  and  Bothwell  galloped  off  into  lifelong 
exile,  while  the  Queen  was  brought  back  to  Edinburgh  in 
a  frenzy  of  despair,  tossing  back  wild  words  of  defiance  to 
the  curses  of  the  crowd. 


CHAPTER  V. 

ENGLAND   AND   THE  PAPACY. 
1567—1576. 

THE  fall  of  Mary  freed  Elizabeth  from  the  most  terrible 
of  her  outer  dangers.  But  it  left  her  still  struggling  with 
ever-growing  dangers  at  home.  The  religious  peace  for 
which  she  had  fought  so  hard  was  drawing  to  an  end. 
Sturdily  as  she  might  aver  to  her  subjects  that  no  change 
had  really  been  made  in  English  religion,  that  the  old  faith 
had  only  been  purified,  that  the  realm  had  only  been  freed 
from  Papal  usurpation,  jealously  as  she  might  preserve  the 
old  episcopate,  the  old  service,  the  old  vestments  and  usages 
of  public  worship,  her  action  abroad  told  too  plainly  its 
tale.  The  world  was  slowly  drifting  to  a  gigantic  conflict 
between  the  tradition  of  the  past  and  a  faith  that  rejected 
the  tradition  of  the  past ;  and  in  this  conflict  men  saw  that 
England  was  ranging  itself  not  on  the  side  of  the  old  belief 
but  of  the  new.  The  real  meaning  of  Elizabeth's  attitude 
was  revealed  in  her  refusal  to  own  the  Council  of  Trent. 
From  that  moment  the  hold  which  she  had  retained  on  all 
who  still  clung  strongly  to  Catholic  doctrine  was  roughly 
shaken.  Her  system  of  conformity  received  a  heavy  blow 
from  the  decision  of  the  Papacy  that  attendance  at  the 
common  prayer  was  unlawful.  Her  religious  compromise 
was  almost  destroyed  by  the  victory  of  the  Guises.  In  the 
moment  of  peril  she  was  driven  on  Protestant  support,  and 
Protestant  support  had  to  be  bought  by  a  Test  Act  which 
excluded  every  zealous  Catholic  from  all  share  in  the  gov- 
ernment or  administration  of  the  realm,  while  the  re-en- 
actment of  Edward's  Articles  by  the  Convocation  of  the 
clergy  was  in  avowal  of  Protestantism  which  none  could 


868  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

mistake.  Whatever  in  fact  might  be  Elizabeth's  own 
predilections,  even  the  most  cautious  of  Englishmen  could 
hardly  doubt  of  the  drift  of  her  policy.  The  hopes  which 
the  party  of  moderation  had  founded  on  a  marriage  with 
Philip,  or  a  marriage  with  the  Austrian  Archduke,  or  a 
marriage  with  Dudley,  had  all  passed  away.  The  con- 
ciliatory efforts  of  Pope  Pius  had  been  equally  fruitless. 
The  last  hope  of  a  quiet  undoing  of  the  religious  changes 
lay  in  the  succession  of  Mary  Stuart.  But  with  the  fall  of 
Mary  a  peaceful  return  to  the  older  faith  became  impos- 
sible; and  the  consciousness  of  this  could  hardly  fail  to 
wake  new  dangers  for  Elizabeth,  whether  at  home  or 
abroad. 

It  was  in  fact  at  this  moment  of  seeming  triumph  that 
the  great  struggle  of  her  reign  began.  In  1565  a  pontiff 
was  chosen  to  fill  the  Papal  chair  whose  policy  was  that 
of  open  war  between  England  and  Rome.  At  no  moment 
in  its  history  had  the  fortunes  of  the  Roman  See  sunk  so 
low  as  at  the  accession  of  Pius  the  Fifth.  The  Catholic 
revival  had  as  yet  done  nothing  to  arrest  the  march  of  the 
Reformation.  In  less  than  half  a  century  the  new  doc- 
trines had  spread  from  Iceland  to  the  Pyrenees  and  from 
Finland  to  the  Alps.  When  Pius  mounted  the  throne 
Lutheranism  was  firmly  established  in  Scandinavia  and  in 
Northern  Germany.  Along  the  eastern  border  of  the  Em- 
pire it  had  conquered  Livonia  and  Old  Prussia ;  its  adhe- 
rents formed  a  majority  of  the  nobles  of  Poland ;  Hungary 
seemed  drifting  toward  heresy ;  and  in  Transylvania  the 
Diet  had  already  confiscated  aU  Church  lands.  In  Central 
Germany  the  great  prelates  whose  princedoms  covered  so 
large  a  part  of  Franconia  opposed  in  vain  the  spread  of 
Lutheran  doctrine.  It  seemed  as  triumphant  in  Southern 
Germany,  for  the  Duchy  of  Austria  was  for  the  most  part 
Lutheran,  and  many  of  the  Bavarian  towns  with  a  large 
part  of  the  Bavarian  nobles  had  espoused  the  cause  of  the 
Reformation.  In  Western  Europe  the  fiercer  doctrines  of 
Calvinism  took  the  place  of  the  faith  of  Luther.  At  the 


CHAP.  3.j  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  369 

death  of  Henry  the  Second  Calvin's  missionaries  poured 
from  Geneva  over  France,  and  in  a  few  years  every 
province  of  the  realm  was  dotted  with  Calvinistic  churches. 
The  Huguenots  rose  into  a  great  political  and  religious 
party  which  struggled  openly  for  the  mastery  of  the  realm 
and  wrested  from  the  Crown  a  legal  recognition  of  its  ex- 
istence and  of  freedom  of  worship.  The  influence  of 
France  told  quickly  on  the  regions  about  it.  The  Rhine- 
land  was  fast  losing  its  hold  on  Catholicism.  In  the 
Netherlands,  where  the  persecutions  of  Charles  the  Fifth 
had  failed  to  check  the  upgrowth  of  heresy,  his  successor 
saw  Calvinism  win  state  after  state,  and  gird  itself  to  a 
desperate  struggle  at  once  for  religious  and  for  civil  in- 
dependence. Still  further  west  a  sudden  revolution  had 
won  Scotland  for  the  faith  of  Geneva;  and  a  revolution 
hardly  less  sudden,  though  marked  with  consummate  sub- 
tlety, had  in  effect  added  England  to  the  Churches  of  the 
Reformation.  Christendom  in  fact  was  almost  lost  to  the 
Papacy ;  for  only  two  European  countries  owned  its  sway 
without  dispute.  "  There  remain  firm  to  the  Pope,"  wrote 
a  Venetian  ambassador  to  his  State,  "  only  Spain  and  Italy 
with  some  few  islands,  and  those  countries  possessed  by 
your  Serenity  in  Dalmatia  and  Greece." 

It  was  at  this  moment  of  defeat  that  Pius  the  Fifth 
mounted  the  Papal  throne.  His  earlier  life  had  been  that 
of  an  Inquisitor;  and  he  combined  the  ruthlessness  of  a 
persecutor  with  the  ascetic  devotion  of  a  saint.  Pius  had 
but  one  end,  that  of  re-conquering  Christendom,  of  restor- 
ing the  rebel  nations  to  the  fold  of  the  Church,  and  of 
stamping  out  heresy  by  fire  and  sword.  To  his  fiery  faith 
every  means  of  warfare  seemed  hallowed  by  the  sanctity  of 
his  cause.  The  despotism  of  the  prince,  the  passion  of  the 
populace,  the  sword  of  the  mercenary,  the  very  dagger  of 
the  assassin,  were  all  seized  without  scruple  as  weapons  in 
the  warfare  of  God.  The  ruthlessness  of  the  Inquisitor 
was  turned  into  the  world-wide  policy  of  the  Papacy. 
Wljen  Philip  doubted  how  to  deal  w_ith  the  troubles  in  the 


370  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boon  VI. 

Netherlands,  Pius  bade  him  deal  with  them  by  force  of 
arms.  When  the  Pope  sent  soldiers  of  his  own  to  join  the 
Catholics  in  France  he  bade  their  leader  "  slay  instantly 
whatever  heretic  fell  into  his  hands."  The  massacres  of 
Alva  were  rewarded  by  a  gift  of  the  consecrated  hat  and 
sword,  as  the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew  was  hailed  by 
the  successor  of  Pius  with  a  solemn  thanksgiving.  The 
force  of  the  Pope's  effort  lay  in  its  concentration  of  every 
energy  on  a  single  aim.  Rome  drew  in  fact  a  new  power 
from  the  ruin  of  her  schemes  of  secular  aggrandizement. 
The  narrower  hopes  and  dreads  which  had  sprung  from 
their  position  as  Italian  princes  told  no  longer  on  the 
Popes.  All  hope  of  the  building  up  of  a  wider  princedom 
passed  away.  The  hope  of  driving  the  stranger  from  Italy 
came  equally  to  an  end.  But  on  the  other  hand  Rome  was 
screened  from  the  general  conflicts  of  the  secular  powers. 
It  was  enabled  to  be  the  friend  of  every  Catholic  State, 
and  that  at  a  moment  when  every  Catholic  State  saw  in 
the  rise  of  Calvinism  a  new  cause  for  seeking  its  friend- 
ship. Calvinism  drew  with  it  a  thirst  for  political  liberty, 
and  religious  revolution  became  the  prelude  to  political 
revolution.  From  this  moment  therefore  the  cause  of  the 
Papacy  became  the  cause  of  kings,  and  a  craving  for  self- 
preservation  rallied  the  Catholic  princes  round  the  Papal 
throne.  The  same  dread  of  utter  ruin  rallied  round  it  the 
Catholic  Church.  All  strife,  all  controversy  was  hushed 
in  the  presence  of  the  foe.  With  the  close  of  the  Council 
of  Trent  came  a  unity  of  feeling  and  of  action  such  as  had 
never  been  seen  before.  Faith  was  defined.  The  Papal 
authority  stood  higher  than  ever.  The  bishops  owned 
themselves  to  be  delegates  of  the  Roman  See.  The  clergy 
were  drawn  together  into  a  disciplined  body  by  the  institu- 
tion of  seminaries.  The  new  religious  orders  carried 
everywhere  the  watchword  of  implicit  obedience.  As  the 
heresy  of  Calvin  pressed  on  to  one  victory  after  another, 
the  Catholic  world  drew  closer  and  closer  round  the  stand- 
ard of  Rome. 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  371 

What  raised  the  warfare  of  Pius  into  grandeur  was  the 
scale  upon  which  he  warred.  His  hand  was  everywhere 
throughout  Christendom.  Under  him  Rome  became  the 
political  as  well  as  the  religious  centre  of  Western  Europe. 
The  history  of  the  Papacy  widened  again,  as  in  the  Middle 
Ages,  into  the  history  of  the  world.  Every  scheme  of  the 
Catholic  resistance  was  devised  or  emboldened  at  Rome. 
While  her  Jesuit  emissaries  won  a  new  hold  in  Bavaria 
and  Southern  Germany,  rolled  back  the  tide  of  Protestant- 
ism in  the  Rhine-land,  and  by  school  and  pulpit  labored  to 
re-Catholicize  the  Empire,  Rome  spurred  Mary  Stuart  to 
the  Darnley  marriage,  urged  Philip  to  march  Alva  on  the 
Netherlands,  broke  up  the  religious  truce  which  Catharine 
had  won  for  France,  and  celebrated  with  solemn  pomp  the 
massacre  of  the  Huguenots.  England  above  all  was  the 
object  of  Papal  attack.  The  realm  of  Elizabeth  was  too 
important  for  the  general  Papal  scheme  of  re-conquering 
Christendom  to  be  lightly  let  go.  England  alone  could 
furnish  a  centre  to  the  reformed  communions  of  Western 
Europe.  The  Lutheran  states  of  North  Germany  were 
too  small.  The  Scandinavian  kingdoms  were  too  remote. 
Scotland  hardly  ranked  as  yet  as  a  European  power.  Even 
if  France  joined  the  new  movement  her  influence  would 
long  be  neutralized  by  the  strife  of  the  religious  parties 
within  her  pale.  But  England  was  to  outer  seeming  a 
united  realm.  Her  government  held  the  country  firmly  in 
hand.  Whether  as  an  island  or  from  her  neighborhood  to 
the  chief  centres  of  the  religious  strife,  she  was  so  placed 
as  to  give  an  effective  support  to  the  new  opinions.  Prot- 
estant refugees  found  a  safe  shelter  within  her  bounds. 
Her  trading  ships  diffused  heresy  in  every  port  they 
touched  at.  She  could  at  little  risk  feed  the  Calvinistic 
revolution  in  France  or  the  Netherlands.  In  the  great 
battle  of  the  old  faith  and  the  new  England  was  thus  the 
key  of  the  reformed  position.  With  England  Protestant 
the  fight  against  Protestantism  could  only  be  a  slow  and 
doubtful  one.  On  the  other  hand  a  Catholic  England 


372  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VL 

would  render  religious  revolution  in  the  west  all  but  hope- 
less. Hand  in  hand  with  Philip  religiously,  as  she  al- 
ready was  politically,  the  great  island  might  turn  the  tide 
of  the  mighty  conflict  which  had  so  long  gone  against  the 
Papacy. 

It  was  from  this  sense  of  the  importance  of  England  in 
the  world- wide  struggle  which  it  was  preparing  that  Rome 
had  watched  with  such  a  feverish  interest  the  effort  of  Mary 
Stuart.  Her  victory  would  have  given  to  Catholicism  the 
two  westernmost  realms  of  the  Reformation,  England  and 
Scotland;  it  would  have  aided  it  in  the  re-conquest  of  the 
Netherlands  and  of  France.  No  formal  bond  indeed,  such 
as  the  Calvinists  believed  to  exist,  bound  Mary  and  Pius 
and  Philip  and  Catharine  of  Medicis  together  in  a  vast 
league  for  the  restoration  of  the  Faith ;  the  difference  of 
political  aim  held  France  and  Spain  obstinately  apart  both 
from  each  other  and  from  Mary  Stuart,  and  it  was  only  at 
the  Vatican  that  the  great  movement  was  conceived  as  a 
whole.  But  practically  the  policy  of  Mary  and  Philip 
worked  forward  to  the  same  end.  While  the  Scottish 
Queen  prepared  her  counter-reformation  in  England  and 
Scotland,  Philip  was  gathering  a  formidable  host  which 
was  to  suppress  Calvinism  as  well  as  liberty  in  the  Nether- 
lands. Of  the  seventeen  provinces  which  Philip  had  in- 
nerited  from  his  father,  Charles,  in  this  part  of  his  domin- 
ions, each  had  its  own  constitution,  its  own  charter  and 
privileges,  its  own  right  of  taxation.  All  clung  to  their 
local  independence ;  and  resistance  to  any  projects  of  cen- 
tralization was  common  to  the  great  nobles  and  the 
burghers  of  the  towns.  Philip  on  the  other  hand  was 
resolute  to  bring  them  by  gradual  steps  to  the  same  level 
of  absolute  subjection  and  incorporation  in  the  body  of  the 
monarchy  as  the  provinces  of  Castile.  The  Netherlands 
were  the  wealthiest  part  of  his  dominions.  Flanders  alone 
contributed  more  to  his  exchequer  than  all  his  kingdoms  in 
Spain.  With  a  treasury  drained  by  a  thousand  schemes 
Philip  longed  to  have  this  wealth  at  his  unfettered  dis- 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540— 1«08.  373 

posal,  while  his  absolutism  recoiled  from  the  independence 
of  the  States,  and  his  bigotry  drove  him  to  tread  their 
heresy  under  foot.  Policy  backed  the  impulses  of  greed 
and  fanaticism.  In  the  strangely  mingled  mass  of  the 
Spanish  monarchy,  the  one  bond  which  held  together  its 
various  parts,  divided  as  they  were  by  blood,  by  tradition, 
by  tongue,  was  their  common  faith.  Philip  was  in  more 
than  name  the  "  Catholic  King. "  Catholicism  alone  united 
the  burgher  of  the  Netherlands  to  the  nobles  of  Castile, 
or  Milanese  and  Neapolitan  to  the  Aztec  of  Mexico  and 
Peru.  With  such  an  empire  heresy  meant  to  Philip  polit- 
ical chaos,  and  the  heresy  of  Calvin,  with  its  ready  or- 
ganization and  its  doctrine  of  resistance,  promised  not  only 
chaos  but  active  revolt.  In  spite  therefore  of  the  growing 
discontent  in  the  Netherlands,  in  spite  of  the  alienation  of 
the  nobles  and  the  resistance  of  the  Estates,  he  clung  to  a 
system  of  government  which  ignored  the  liberties  of  every 
province,  and  to  a  persecution  which  drove  thousands  of 
skilled  workmen  to  the  shores  of  England. 

At  last  the  general  discontent  took  shape  in  open  resist- 
ance. The  success  of  the  French  Huguenots  in  wresting 
the  free  exercise  rf  their  faith  from  the  monarchy  told  on 
the  Calvinists  01  the  Low  Countries.  The  nobles  gathered 
in  leagues.  Riots  broke  out  in  the  towns.  The  churches 
were  sacked,  and  heretic  preachers  preached  in  the  open 
fields  to  multitudes  who  carried  weapons  to  protect  them. 
If  Philip's  system  was  to  continue  it  must  be  by  force  of 
arms,  and  the  King  seized  the  disturbances  as  a  pretext 
for  dealing  a  blow  he  had  long  meditated  at  the  growing 
heresy  of  this  portion  of  his  dominions.  Pius  the  Fifth 
pressed  him  to  deal  with  heresy  by  the  sword,  and  in  1567 
an  army  of  ten  thousand  men  gathered  in  Italy  under  the 
Duke  of  Alva  for  a  march  on  the  Low  Countries.  Had 
Alva  reached  the  Netherlands  while  Mary  was  still  in  the 
flush  of  her  success,  it  is  hard  to  see  how  England  could 
have  been  saved.  But  again  Fortune  proved  Elizabeth's 
friend.  The  passion  of  Mary  shattered  the  hopes  of  Ca- 


374  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

tholicism,  and  at  the  moment  when  Alva  led  his  troops 
over  the  Alps  Mary  passed  a  prisoner  within  the  walls  of 
Lochleven.  Alone  however  the  Duke  was  a  mighty- 
danger  :  nor  could  any  event  have  been  more  embarrass- 
ing to  Elizabeth  than  his  arrival  in  the  Netherlands  in 
the  autumn  of  1567.  The  terror  he  inspired  hushed  all 
thought  of  resistance.  The  towns  were  occupied.  The 
heretics  were  burned.  The  greatest  nobles  were  sent  to  the 
block  or  driven,  like  William  of  Orange,  from  the  country. 
The  Netherlands  lay  at  Philip's  feet;  and  Alva's  army 
lowered  like  a  thundercloud  over  the  Protestant  West. 

The  triumph  of  Catholicism  and  the  presence  of  a  Cath- 
olic army  in  a  country  so  closely  connected  with  England 
at  once  revived  the  dreams  of  a  Catholic  rising  against 
Elizabeth's  throne,  while  the  news  of  Alva's  massacres 
stirred  in  every  one  of  her  Protestant  subjects  a  thirst  for 
revenge  which  it  was  hard  to  hold  in  check.  Yet  to  strike 
a  blow  at  Alva  was  impossible.  Antwerp  was  the  great 
mart  of  English  trade,  and  a  stoppage  of  the  trade  with 
Flanders,  such  as  war  must  bring  about,  would  have 
broken  hah5  the  merchants  in  London.  Elizabeth  could 
only  look  on  while  the  Duke  trod  resistance  and  heresy 
under  foot,  and  prepared  in  the  Low  Countries  a  securer 
starting-point  for  his  attack  on  Protestantism  in  the  West. 
With  Elizabeth  indeed  or  her  cautious  and  moderate 
Lutheranism  Philip  had  as  yet  little  will  to  meddle,  how- 
ever hotly  Rome  might  urge  him  to  attack  her.  He  knew 
that  the  Calvinism  of  the  Netherlands  looked  for  support 
to  the  Calvinism  of  France;  and  as  soon  as  Alva's  work 
was  done  in  the  Low  Countries  the  Duke  had  orders  to  aid 
the  Guises  in  assailing  the  Huguenots.  But  the  terror  of 
the  Huguenots  precipitated  the  strife,  and  while  Alva  was 
still  busy  with  attacks  from  the  patriots  under  the  princes 
of  the  house  of  Orange  a  fresh  rising  in  France  woke  the 
civil  war  at  the  close  of  1567.  Catharine  lulled  this  strife 
for  the  moment  by  a  new  edict  of  toleration ;  but  the  pres- 
ence of  Alva  was  stirring  hopes  and  fears  in  other  lands 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  375 

than  France.  Between  Mary  Stuart  and  the  lords  who 
had  imprisoned  her  in  Lochleven  reconciliation  was  im- 
possible. Elizabeth,  once  lightened  of  her  dread  from 
Mary,  would  have  been  content  with  a  restoration  of  Mur- 
ray's actual  supremacy.  Already  alarmed  by  Calvinistic 
revolt  against  monarchy  in  France,  she  was  still  more 
alarmed  by  the  success  of  Calvinistic  revolt  against  mon- 
archy in  Scotland ;  and  the  presence  of  Alva  in  the  Nether- 
lands made  her  anxious  above  all  to  settle  the  troubles  in 
the  north  and  to  devise  some  terms  of  reconciliation  be- 
tween Mary  and  her  subjects.  But  it  was  in  vain  that  she 
demanded  the  release  of  the  Queen.  The  Scotch  Protest- 
ants, with  Knox  at  their  head,  called  loudly  for  Mary's 
death  as  a  murderess.  If  the  lords  shrank  from  such  ex- 
tremities, they  had  no  mind  to  set  her  free  and  to  risk 
their  heads  for  Elizabeth's  pleasure.  As  the  price  of  her 
life  they  forced  Mary  to  resign  her  crown  in  favor  of  her 
child,  and  to  name  Murray,  who  was  now  returning  from 
France,  as  regent  during  his  minority.  In  July,  1567,  the 
babe  was  solemnly  crowned  as  James  the  Sixth. 

But  Mary  had  only  consented  to  abdicate  because  she 
felt  sure  of  escape.  With  an  infant  king  the  regency  of 
Murray  promised  to  be  a  virtual  sovereignty ;  and  the  old 
factions  of  Scotland. woke  again  into  life.  The  house  of 
Hamilton,  which  stood  next  in  succession  to  the  throne, 
became  the  centre  of  a  secret  league  which  gathered  to  it 
the  nobles  and  prelates  who  longed  for  the  re-establishment 
of  Catholicism,  and  who  saw  in  Alva's  triumph  a  pledge 
of  their  own.  The  regent's  difficulties  were  doubled  by 
the  policy  of  Elizabeth.  Her  wrath  at  the  revolt  of  sub- 
jects against  their  Queen,  her  anxiety  that  "  by  this  ex- 
ample none  of  her  own  be  encouraged,"  only  grew  with 
the  disregard  of  her  protests  and  threats.  In  spite  of 
Cecil  she  refused  to  recognize  Murray's  government,  re- 
newed her  demands  for  the  Queen's  release,  and  encour- 
aged the  Hamiltons  in  their  designs  of  freeing  her.  She 
was  in  fact  stirred  by  more  fears  than  her  dread  of  Calvin- 


376  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

ism  and  of  Calvinistic  liberty.  Philip's  triumph  in  the 
Netherlands  and  the  presence  of  his  army  across  the  sea 
was  filling  the  Catholics  of  the  northern  counties  with  new 
hopes,  and  scaring  Elizabeth  from  any  joint  action  with 
the  Scotch  Calvinists  which  might  call  the  Spanish  forces 
over  sea.  She  even  stooped  to  guard  against  any  possible 
projects  of  Philip  by  fresh  negotiations  for  a  marriage 
with  one  of  the  Austrian  archdukes.  But  the  negotiations 
proved  as  fruitless  as  before,  while  Scotland  moved  boldly 
forward  in  its  new  career.  A  Parliament  which  assembled 
at  the  opening  of  1568  confirmed  the  deposition  of  the 
Queen,  and  made  Catholic  worship  punishable  with  the 
pain  of  death.  The  triumph  of  Calvinistic  bigotry  only 
hastened  the  outbreak  which  had  long  been  preparing,  and 
at  the  beginning  of  May  an  escape  of  Mary  from  her  prison 
was  a  signal  for  civil  war.  Five  days  later  six  thousand 
men  gathered  round  her  at  Hamilton,  and  Argyle  joined  the 
Catholic  lords  who  rallied  to  her  banner.  The  news  found 
different  welcomes  at  the  English  court.  Elizabeth  at 
once  offered  to  arbitrate  between  Mary  and  her  subjects. 
Cecil,  on  the  other  hand,  pressed  Murray  to  strike  quick 
and  hard.  But  the  regent  needed  little  pressing.  Sur- 
prised as  he  was,  Murray  was  quickly  in  arms ;  and  cut- 
ting off  Mary's  force  as  it  moved  on  Dumbarton,  he 
brought  it  to  battle  at  Langside  on  the  Clyde  on  the  thir- 
teenth of  May,  and  broke  it  in  a  panicstricken  rout.  Mary 
herself,  after  a  fruitless  effort  to  reach  Dumbarton,  fled 
southward  to  find  a  refuge  in  Galloway.  A  ride  of  ninety 
miles  brought  her  to  the  Solway,  but  she  found  her  friends 
wavering  in  her  support  and  ready  to  purchase  pardon 
from  Murray  by  surrendering  her  into  the  regent's  hands. 
From  that  moment  she  abandoned  all  hope  from  Scotland. 
She  believed  that  Elizabeth  would  in  the  interests  of  mon- 
archy restore  her  to  the  throne ;  and  changing  her  designs 
with  the  rapidity  of  genius,  she  pushed  in  a  light  boat 
across  the  Solway,  and  was  safe  before  the  evening  fell  in 
the  castle  of  Carlisle. 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  877 

The  presence  of  Alva  in  Flanders  was  a  far  less  peril 
than  the  presence  of  Mary  in  Carlisle.  To  restore  her,  as 
she  demanded,  by  force  of  arms  was  impossible.  If  Eliza- 
beth was  zealous  for  the  cause  of  monarchy,  she  had  no 
mind  to  crush  the  nobles  who  had  given  her  security 
against  her  rival  simply  to  seat  that  rival  triumphantly 
on  the  throne.  On  the  other  hand  to  retain  her  in  Eng- 
land was  to  furnish  a  centre  for  revolt.  Mary  herself  in- 
deed threatened  that  "  if  they  kept  her  prisoner  they  should 
have  enough  to  do  with  her."  If  the  Queen  would  not  aid 
in  her  restoration  to  the  throne,  she  demanded  a  free  pas- 
sage to  France.  But  compliance  with  such  a  request  would 
have  given  the  Guises  a  terrible  weapon  against  Elizabeth 
and  have  insured  French  intervention  in  Scotland.  Foi 
a  while  Elizabeth  hoped  to  bring  Murray  to  receive  Mary 
back  peaceably  as  Queen.  But  the  regent  refused  to  sacri- 
fice himself  and  the  realm  to  Elizabeth's  policy.  When 
the  Duke  of  Norfolk  with  other  commissioners  appeared 
at  York  to  hold  a  formal  inquiry  into  Mary's  conduct  with 
a  view  to  her  restoration,  Murray  openly  charged  the 
Queen  with  a  share  in  the  murder  of  her  husband,  and  he 
produced  letters  from  her  to  Bothwell,  which  if  genuine 
substantiate!:  the  charge.  ,  Till  Mary  was  cleared  of  guilt, 
Murray  would  hear  nothing  of  her  return,  and  Mary  re- 
fused to  submit  to  such  a  trial  as  would  clear  her.  So 
eager  however  was  Elizabeth  to  get  rid  of  the  pressing 
peril  of  her  presence  in  England  that  Mary's  refusal  to 
submit  to  any  trial  only  drove  her  to  fresh  devices  for  her 
restoration.  She  urged  upon  Murray  the  suppression  of 
the  graver  charges,  and  upon  Mary  the  leaving  Murray  in 
actual  possession  of  the  royal  power  as  the  price  of  her  re- 
turn. Neither  however  would  listen  to  terms  which  sacri- 
ficed both  to  Elizabeth's  self-interest.  The  Regent  per- 
sisted in  charging  the  Queen  with  murder  and  adultery. 
Mary  refused  either  to  answer  or  to  abdicate  in  favor  of 
her  infant  son. 

The  triumph  indeed  of  her  bold  policy  was  best  advanced, 


878  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  Vt 

as  the  Queen  of  Scots  had  no  doubt  foreseen,  by  simple  in- 
action. Her  misfortunes,  her  resolute  denials  were  gradu- 
ally wiping  away  the  stain  of  her  guilt  and  winning  back 
the  Catholics  of  England  to  her  cause.  Already  there 
were  plans  for  her  marriage  with  Norfolk,  the  head  of  the 
English  nobles,  as  for  her  marriage  with  the  heir  of  the 
Hamiltons.  The  first  match  might  give  her  the  English 
crown,  the  second  could  hardly  fail  to  restore  her  to  the 
crown  of  Scotland.  In  any  case  her  presence,  rousing  as 
it  did  fresh  hopes  of  a  Catholic  reaction,  put  pressure  on 
her  sister  Queen.  Elizabeth  "had  the  wolf  by  the  ears," 
while  the  fierce  contest  which  Alva's  presence  roused  in 
France  and  in  the  Netherlands  was  firing  the  temper  of 
the  two  great  parties  in  England.  In  the  Court,  as  in  the 
country,  the  forces  of  progress  and  of  resistance  stood  at 
last  in  sharp  and  declared  opposition  to  each  other.  Cecil 
at  the  head  of  the  Protestants  demanded  a  general  alliance 
with  the  Protestant  churches  throughout  Europe,  a  war 
in  the  Low  Countries  against  Alva,  and  the  unconditional 
surrender  of  Mary  to  her  Scotch  subjects  for  the  punish- 
ment she  deserved.  The  Catholics  on  the  other  hand, 
backed  by  the  mass  of  the  Conservative  party  with  the 
Duke  of  Norfolk  at  its  head,  and  supported  by  the  wealth- 
ier merchants  who  dreaded  the  ruin  of  the  Flemish  trade, 
were  as  earnest  in  demanding  the  dismissal  of  Cecil  and 
the  Protestants  from  the  council-board,  a  steady  peace 
with  Spain,  and,  though  less  openly,  a  recognition  of 
Mary's  succession.  Elizabeth  was  driven  to  temporize  as 
before.  She  refused  Cecil's  counsels;  but  she  sent  money 
and  arms  to  Conde,  and  hampered  A.va  by  seizing  treasure 
on  its  way  to  him,  and  by  pushing  ,he  quarrel  even  to  a 
temporary  embargo  on  shipping  either  side  the  sea.  She 
refused  the  counsels  of  Norfolk;  but  she  would  hear 
nothing  of  a  declaration  of  war,  or  give  any  judgment 
on  the  chai-ges  against  the  Scottish  Queen,  or  recognize 
the  accession  of  James  in  her  stead. 

But  to  the  pressure  of  Alva  and  Mary  was  now  added 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  379 

the  pressure  of  Rome.  With  the  triumph  of  Philip  in  the 
Netherlands  and  of  the  Guises  in  France  Pius  the  Fifth 
held  that  the  time  had  come  for  a  decisive  attack  on  Eliz- 
abeth. If  Philip  held  back  from  playing  the  champion 
of  Catholicism,  if  even  the  insults  to  Alva  failed  to  stir 
him  to  active  hostility,  Rome  could  still  turn  to  its  adhe- 
rents within  the  realm.  Pius  had  already  sent  two  envoys 
in  1567  with  powers  to  absolve  the  English  Catholics  who 
had  attended  church  from  their  schism,  but  to  withdraw 
all  hope  of  future  absolution  for  those  who  continued  to 
conform.  The  result  of  their  mission  however  had  been 
so  small  that  it  was  necessary  to  go  further.  The  triumph 
of  Alva  in  the  Netherlands,  the  failure  of  the  Prince  of 
Orange  in  an  attempt  to  rescue  them  from  the  Spanish 
army,  the  terror-struck  rising  of  the  French  Huguenots, 
the  growing  embarrassments  of  Elizabeth  both  at  home 
and  abroad,  seemed  to  offer  Rome  its  opportunity  of  deliv- 
ering a  final  blow.  In  February,  1569,  the  Queen  was  de- 
clared a  heretic  by  a  Bull  which  asserted  in  their  strong- 
est form  the  Papal  claims  to  a  temporal  supremacy  over 
princes.  As  a  heretic  and  excommunicate,  she  was  "  de- 
prived of  her  pretended  right  to  the  said  kingdom,"  her 
subjects  were  absolved  from  allegiance  to  her,  commanded 
"not  to  dare  to  obey  her,"  and  anathematized  if  they  did 
obey.  The  Bull  was  not  as  yet  promulgated,  but  Dr.  Mor- 
ton was  sent  into  England  to  denounce  the  Queen  as  fallen 
from  her  usurped  authority,  and  to  promise  the  speedy 
issue  of  the  sentence  of  deposition.  The  religious  pressure 
was  backed  by  political  intrigue.  Ridolfi,  an  Italian  mer- 
chant settled  in  London,  who  had  received  full  powers  and 
money  from  Rome,  knit  the  threads  of  a  Catholic  revolt 
in  the  north,  and  drew  the  Duke  of  Norfolk  into  corre- 
spondence with  Mary  Stuart.  The  Duke  was  the  son  of 
Lord  Surrey  and  grandson  of  the  Norfolk  who  had  headed 
the  Conservative  party  through  the  reign  of  Henry  the 
Eighth.  Like  the  rest  of  the  English  peers,  he  had  acqui- 
esced in  the  religious  compromise  of  the  Queen.  It  was 


380  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  YL 

as  a  Protestant  that  the  more  Conservative  among  his  fel- 
low nobles  now  supported  a  project  for  his  union  with  the 
Scottish  Queen.  With  an  English  and  Protestant  hus- 
band it  was  thought  that  Murray  and  the  lords  might 
safely  take  back  Mary  to  the  Scottish  throne,  and  Eng- 
land again  accept  her  as  the  successor  to  her  crown.  But 
Norfolk  was  not  contented  with  a  single  game.  From 
the  Pope  and  Philip  he  sought  aid  in  his  marriage-plot  as 
a  Catholic  at  heart,  whose  success  would  bring  about  a 
restoration  of  Catholicism  throughout  the  realm.  With 
the  Catholic  lords  he  plotted  the  overthrow  of  Cecil  and 
the  renewal  of  friendship  with  Spain.  To  carry  out 
schemes  such  as  these  however  required  a  temper  of  sub- 
tler and  bolder  stamp  than  the  Duke's :  Cecil  found  it  easy 
by  playing  on  his  greed  to  part  him  from  his  fellow  no- 
bles; his  marriage  with  Mary  as  a  Protestant  was  set 
aside  by  Murray's  refusal  to  accept  her  as  Queen;  and 
Norfolk  promised  to  enter  into  no  correspondence  with 
Mary  Stuart  but  with  Elizabeth's  sanction. 

The  hope  of  a  crown,  whether  in  Scotland  or  at  home, 
proved  too  great  however  for  his  good  faith,  and  Norfolk 
was  soon  wrapped  anew  in  the  net  of  papal  intrigue.  But 
it  was  not  so  much  on  Norfolk  that  Rome  counted  as  on 
the  nobles  of  the  North.  The  three  great  houses  of  the 
northern  border — the  Cliffords  of  Cumberland,  the  Ne- 
villes of  Westmoreland,  the  Percies  of  Northumberland — 
had  remained  Catholics  at  heart;  and  from  the  moment 
of  Mary's  entrance  into  England  they  had  been  only  wait- 
ing for  a  signal  of  revolt.  They  looked  for  foreign  aid, 
and  foreign  aid  now  seemed  assured.  In  spite  of  Eliza- 
beth's help  the  civil  war  in  France  went  steadily  against 
the  Huguenots.  In  March,  1569,  their  army  was  routed  at 
Jarnac,  and  their  leader,  Conde,  left  dead  on  the  field. 
The  joy  with  which  the  victory  was  greeted  by  the  Eng- 
lish Catholics  sprang  from  a  consciousness  that  the  victors 
looked  on  it  as  a  prelude  to  their  attack  on  Protestantism 
across  the  sea.  No  sooner  indeed  was  this  triumph  won 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  381 

than  Mary's  uncle,  the  Cardinal  of  Lorraine,  as  the  head 
of  the  house  of  Guise,  proposed  to  Philip  to  complete  the 
victory  of  Catholicism  by  uniting  the  forces  of  France  and 
Spain  against  Elizabeth.  The  moment  was  one  of  peril 
such  as  England  had  never  known.  Norfolk  was  still 
pressing  forward  to  a  marriage  with  Mary ;  he  was  backed 
by  the  second  great  Conservative  peer,  Lord  Arundel,  and 
supported  by  a  large  part  of  the  nobles.  The  Northern 
Earls  with  Lords  Montague  and  Lumley  and  the  head  of 
the  great  house  of  Dacres  were  ready  to  take  up  arms,  and 
sure — as  they  believed — of  the  aid  of  the  Earls  of  Derby 
and  Shrewsbury.  Both  parties  of  plotters  sought  Philip's 
sanction  and  placed  themselves  at  his  disposal.  A  descent 
of  French  and  Spanish  troops  would  have  called  both  to 
the  field.  But  much  as  Philip  longed  for  a  triumph  of  re- 
ligion he  had  no  mind  for  a  triumph  of  France.  France 
now  meant  the  Guises,  and  to  set  their  niece  Mary  Stuart 
on  the  English  throne  was  to  insure  the  close  union  of 
England  and  the  France  they  ruled.  Though  he  suffered 
Alva  therefore  to  plan  the  dispatch  of  a  force  from  the 
Netherlands  should  a  Catholic  revolt  prove  successful,  he 
refused  to  join  in  a  French  attack. 

But  the  Papal  exhortations  and  the  victories  of  the 
Guises  did  their  work  without  Philip's  aid.  The  conspir- 
ators of  the  north  only  waited  for  Norfolk's  word  to  rise 
in  arms.  But  the  Duke  dissembled  and  delayed,  while 
Elizabeth,  roused  at  last  to  her  danger,  struck  quick  and 
hard.  Mary  Stuart  was  given  in  charge  to  the  Puritan 
Lord  Huntingdon.  The  Earls  of  Arundel  and  Pembroke, 
with  Lord  Lumley,  were  secured.  Norfolk  himself,  sum- 
moned peremptorily  to  court,  dared  not  disobey ;  and  found 
himself  at  the  opening  of  October  a  prisoner  in  the  Tower. 
The  more  dangerous  plot  was  foiled,  for  whatever  were 
Norfolk's  own  designs,  the  bulk  of  his  Conservative  parti- 
sans were  good  Protestants,  and  their  aim  of  securing  the 
succession  by  a  Protestant  marriage  for  Mary  was  one 
with  which  the  bulk  of  the  nation  would  have  sympathized, 


382  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

But  the  Catholic  plot  remained ;  and  in  October  the  hopes 
of  its  leaders  were  stirred  afresh  by  a  new  defeat  of  the 
Huguenots  at  Montcontour;  while  a  Papal  envoy,  Dr. 
Morton,  goaded  them  to  action  by  news  that  a  Bull  of 
Deposition  was  ready  at  Rome.  At  last  a  summons  to 
court  tested  the  loyalty  of  the  Earls,  and  on  the  tenth  of 
November,  1569,  Northumberland  gave  the  signal  for  a 
rising.  He  was  at  once  joined  by  the  Earl  of  Westmore- 
land, and  in  a  few  days  the  Earls  entered  Durham  and 
called  the  North  to  arms.  They  shrank  from  an  open  re- 
volt against  the  Queen,  and  demanded  only  the  dismissal 
of  her  ministers  and  the  recognition  of  Mary's  right  of 
succession.  But  with  these  demands  went  a  pledge  to  re- 
establish the  Catholic  religion.  The  Bible  and  Prayer- 
book  were  torn  to  pieces,  and  Mass  said  once  more  at  the 
altar  of  Durham  Cathedral,  before  the  Earls  pushed  on  to 
Doncaster  with  an  army  which  soon  swelled  to  thousands 
of  men.  Their  cry  was  "  to  reduce  all  causes  of  religion 
to  the  old  custom  and  usage ;"  and  the  Earl  of  Sussex,  her 
general  in  the  North,  wrote  frankly  to  Elizabeth  that 
"  there  were  not  ten  gentlemen  in  Yorkshire  that  did  allow 
[approve]  her  proceedings  in  the  cause  of  religion."  But 
he  was  as  loyal  as  he  was  frank,  and  held  York  stoutly 
while  the  Queen  ordered  Mary's  hasty  removal  to  a  new 
prison  at  Coventry.  The  storm  however  broke  as  rapidly 
as  it  had  gathered.  Leonard  Dacres  held  aloof.  Lord 
Derby  proved  loyal.  The  Catholic  lords  of  the  south  re- 
fused to  stir  without  help  from  Spain.  The  mass  of  the 
Catholics  throughout  the  country  made  no  sign ;  and  the 
Earls  no  sooner  halted  irresolute  in  presence  of  this  unex- 
pected inaction  than  their  army  caught  the  panic  and  dis- 
persed. Northumberland  and  Weslpioreland  fled  in  the 
middle  of  December,  and  were  followed  in  their  flight  by 
Leonard  Dacres  of  Naworth,  while  their  miserable  adhe- 
rents paid  for  their  disloyalty  in  bloodshed  and  ruin. 

The  ruthless  measures  of  repression  which  followed  this 
revolt  were  the  first  breach  in  the  clemency  of  Elizabeth's 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1608.  383 

rule.  But  they  were  signs  of  terror  which  were  not  lost 
on  her  opponents.  It  was  the  general  inaction  of  the 
Catholics  which  had  foiled  the  hopes  of  the  northern  Earls; 
and  Pope  Pius  resolved  to  stir  them  to  activity  by  publish- 
ing in  March,  1570,  the  Bull  of  Excommunication  and 
Deposition  which  had  been  secretly  issued  in  the  preced- 
ing year.  In  his  Bull  Pius  declared  that  Elizabeth  had 
forfeited  all  right  to  the  throne,  released  her  subjects  from 
their  oath  of  allegiance  to  her,  and  forbade  her  nobles  and 
people  to  obey  her  on  pain  of  excommunication.  In  spite 
of  the  efforts  of  the  Government  to  prevent  the  entry  of 
any  copies  of  this  sentence  into  the  realm  the  Bull  was 
found  nailed  in  a  spirit  of  ironical  defiance  on  the  Bishop 
of  London's  door.  Its  effect  was  far  from  being  what 
Rome  desired.  With  the  exception  of  one  or  two  zealots 
the  English  Catholics  treated  the  Bull  as  a  dead  letter. 
The  duty  of  obeying  the  Queen  seemed  a  certain  thing  to 
them,  while  that  of  obeying  the  Pope  in  temporal  matters 
was  denied  by  most  and  doubted  by  all.  Its  spiritual 
effect  indeed  was  greater.  The  Bull  dealt  a  severe  blow 
to  the  religious  truce  which  Elizabeth  had  secured.  In 
the  North  the  Catholics  withdrew  stubbornly  from  the  na- 
tional worship,  and  everywhere  throughout  the  realm  an 
increase  in  the  number  of  recusants  showed  the  obedience 
of  a  large  body  of  Englishmen  to  the  Papal  command. 
To  the  minds  of  English  statesmen  such  an  obedience  to 
the  Papal  bidding  in  matters  of  religion  only  heralded  an 
obedience  to  the  Papal  bidding  in  matters  of  state.  In 
issuing  the  Bull  of  Deposition  Pius  had  declared  war  upon 
the  Queen.  He  had  threatened  her  throne.  He  had  called 
on  her  subjects  to  revolt.  If  his  secret  pressure  had  stirred 
the  rising  of  the  Northern  Earls,  his  open  declaration  of 
war  might  well  rouse  a  general  insurrection  of  Catholics 
throughout  the  realm,  while  the  plots  of  his  agents  threat- 
ened the  Queen's  life. 

How  real-was  the  last  danger  was  shown  at  this  moment 
by  the  murder  of  Murray.  ^In  January  1570  a  Catholic 


384  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

partisan,  James  Hamilton,  shot  the  Regent  in  the  streets 
of  Linlithgow;  and  Scotland  plunged  at  once  into  war 
between  the  adherents  of  Mary  and  those  of  her  son.  The 
blow  broke  Elizabeth's  hold  on  Scotland  at  a  moment  when 
conspiracy  threatened  her  hold  on  England  itself.  The  de- 
feat of  the  Earls  had  done  little  to  check  the  hopes  of  the 
Roman  court.  Its  intrigues  were  busier  than  ever.  At 
the  close  of  the  rising  Norfolk  was  released  from  the  Tower, 
but  he  was  no  sooner  free  than  he  renewed  his  correspond- 
ence with  the  Scottish  Queen.  Mary  consented  to  wed 
him,  and  the  Duke,  who  still  professed  himself  a  Protes- 
tant, trusted  to  carry  the  bulk  of  the  English  nobles  with 
him  in  pressing  a  marriage  which  seemed  to  take  Mary 
out  of  the  hands  of  French  and  Catholic  intriguers,  to 
make  her  an  Englishwoman,  and  to  settle  the  vexed  ques- 
tion of  the  succession  to  the  throne.  But  it  was  only  to 
secure  this  general  adhesion  that  Norfolk  delayed  to  de- 
clare himself  a  Catholic.  He  sought  the  Pope's  approval 
of  his  plans,  and  appealed  to  Philip  for  the  intervention  of 
a  Spanish  army.  At  the  head  of  this  appeal  stood  the 
name  of  Mary;  while  Norfolk's  name  was  followed  by 
those  of  many  lords  of  "the  old  blood,"  as  the  prouder 
peers  styled  themselves.  The  significance  of  the  request 
was  heightened  by  gatherings  of  Catholic  refugees  at  Ant- 
werp in  the  heart  of  Philip's  dominions  in  the  Low  Coun- 
tries round  the  fugitive  leaders  of  the  Northern  Revolt. 
The  intervention  of  the  Pope  was  brought  to  quicken 
Philip's  slow  designs.  Ridolfi,  as  the  agent  of  the  conspir- 
ators, appeared  at  Rome  and  laid  before  Pius  their  plans 
for  the  marriage  of  Norfolk  and  Mary,  the  union  of  both 
realms  under  the  Duke  and  the  Scottish  Queen,  and  the 
seizure  of  Elizabeth  and  her  counsellors  at  one  of  the  royal 
country  houses.  Pius  backed  the  project  with  his  warm 
approval,  and  Ridolfi  hurried  to  secure  the  needful  aid  from 
Philip  of  Spain. 

Enough  of  these  conspiracies  was  discovered  to  rouse  a 
fresh  ardor  in  the  menaced  Protestants.     While  Ridolfi 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1608,  385 

was  negotiating  at  Rome  and  Madrid,  the  Parliament  met 
to  pass  an  act  of  attainder  against  the  Northern  Earls, 
and  to  declare  the  introduction  of  Papal  Bulls  into  the 
country  an  act  of  high  treason.  It  was  made  treason  to 
call  the  Queen  heretic  or  schismatic,  or  to  deny  her  right 
to  the  throne.  The  rising  indignation  against  Mary,  as 
"the  daughter  of  Debate,  who  discord  fell  doth  sow,"  was 
shown  in  a  statute,  which  declared  any  person  who  laid 
claim  to  the  Crown  during  the  Queen's  lifetime  incapable 
of  ever  succeeding  to  it.  The  disaffection  of  the  Catholics 
was  met  by  imposing  on  all  magistrates  and  public  officers 
the  obligation  of  subscribing  to  the  Articles  of  Faith,  a 
measure  which  in  fact  transferred  the  administration  of 
justice  and  public  order  to  their  Protestant  opponents,  by 
forbidding  conversions  to  Catholicism  or  bringing  into 
England  of  Papal  absolutions  or  objects  consecrated  by  the 
Pope.  Meanwhile  Ridolfi  was  struggling  in  vain  against 
Philip's  caution.  The  King  made  no  objection  to  the 
seizure  or  assassination  of  Elizabeth.  The  scheme  secured 
his  fullest  sympathy ;  no  such  opportunity,  he  held,  would 
ever  offer  again ;  and  he  longed  to  finish  the  affair  quickly 
before  France  should  take  part  in  it.  But  he  could  not  be 
brought  to  send  troops  to  England  before  Elizabeth  was 
secured.  If  troops  were  once  sent,  the  failure  of  the  plot 
would  mean  war  with  England ;  and  with  fresh  troubles 
threatening  Alva's  hold  on  the  Netherlands  Philip  had  no 
mind  to  risk  an  English  war.  Norfolk  on  the  other  hand 
had  no  mind  to  risk  a  rising  before  Spanish  troops  were 
landed,  and  Ridolfi's  efforts  failed  to  bring  either  Duke  or 
King  to  action.  But  the  clew  to  these  negotiations  had 
long  been  in  Cecil's  hands ;  and  at  the  opening  of  1571 
Norfolk's  schemes  oi'  ambition  were  foiled  by  his  arrest. 
He  was  convicted  of  treason,  and  after  a  few  months'  delay 
executed  at  the  Tower. 

With  the  death  of  Norfolk  and  that  of  Northumberland, 
who  followed  him  to  the  scaffold,  the  dread  of  revolt  within 
the  realm  which  had  so  long  hung  over  England  passed 


386  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI 

quietly  away.  The  failure  of  the  two  attempts  not  only 
showed  the  weakness  and  disunion  of  the  party  of  discon- 
tent and  reaction,  but  it  revealed  the  weakness  of  all  party 
feeling  before  the  rise  of  a  national  temper  which  was 
springing  naturally  out  of  the  peace  of  Elizabeth's  [reign, 
and  which  a  growing  sense  of  danger  to  the  order  and 
prosperity  around  it  was  fast  turning  into  a  passionate 
loyalty  to  the  Queen.  It  was  not  merely  against  Cecil's 
watchfulness  or  Elizabeth's  cunning  that  Mary  and  Philip 
and  the  Percies  dashed  themselves  in  vain ;  it  was  against 
a  new  England.  And  this  England  owed  its  existence  to 
the  Queen.  "I  have  desired,"  Elizabeth  said  proudly  to 
her  Parliament,  "  to  have  the  obedience  of  my  subjects  by 
love,  and  not  by  compulsion. "  Through  the  fourteen  years 
which  had  passed  since  she  mounted  the  throne,  her  sub- 
jects' love  had  been  fairly  won  by  justice  and  good  gov- 
ernment. The  current  of  political  events  had  drawn 
men's  eyes  chiefly  to  the  outer  dangers  of  the  country,  to 
the  policy  of  Philip  and  of  Rome,  to  the  revolutions  of 
France,  to  the  pressure  from  Mary  Stuart.  No  one  had 
watched  these  outer  dangers  so  closely  as  the  Queen.  But 
buried  as  she  seemed  in  foreign  negotiations  and  intrigues, 
Elizabeth  was  above  all  an  English  sovereign.  She  devoted 
herself  ably  and  energetically  to  the  task  of  civil  adminis- 
tration. At  the  first  moment  of  relief  from  the  pressure  of 
outer  troubles,  after  the  treaty  of  Edinburgh,  she  faced  the 
two  main  causes  of  internal  disorder.  The  debasement  of 
the  coinage  was  brought  to  an  end  in  1560.  In  1561  a 
commission  was  issued  to  inquire  into  the  best  means  of 
facing  the  problem  of  social  pauperism. 

Time,  and  the  natural  development  of  new  branches  of 
industry,  were  working  quietly  for  the  relief  of  the  glutted 
labor  market ;  but  a  vast  mass  of  disorder  still  existed  in 
England,  which  found  a  constant  ground  of  resentment  in 
the  enclosures  and  evictions  which  accompanied  the  pro- 
gress of  agricultural  change.  It  was  on  this  host  of 
"  broken  men"  that  every  rebellion  could  count  for  support; 


v,iiAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  387 

their  mere  existence  was  an  encouragement  to  civil  war ; 
while  in  peace  their  presence  was  felt  in  the  insecurity  of 
life  and  property,  in  bands  of  marauders  which  held  whole 
counties  in  terror,  and  in  "  sturdy  beggars"  who  stripped 
travellers  on  the  road.  Under  Elizabeth  as  under  her 
predecessors  the  terrible  measures  of  repression,  whose 
uselessness  More  had  in  vain  pointed  out,  went  pitilessly 
on.  We  find  the  magistrates  of  Somersetshire  capturing 
a  gang  of  a  hundred  at  a  stroke,  hanging  fifty  at  once  on 
the  gallows,  and  complaining  bitterly  to  the  Council  of 
the  necessity  for  waiting  till  the  Assizes  before  they  could 
enjoy  the  spectacle  of  the  fifty  others  hanging  beside  them. 
But  the  Government  were  dealing  with  the  difficulty  in  a 
wiser  and  more  effectual  way.  The  old  powers  to  enforce 
labor  on  the  idle  and  settlement  on  the  vagrant  class  which 
had  been  given  by  statutes  of  Henry  the  Eighth  were  con- 
tinued ;  and  each  town  and  parish  was  held  responsible  for 
the  relief  of  its  indigent  and  disabled  poor,  as  well  as  for 
the  employment  of  able-bodied  mendicants.  But  a  more 
efficient  machinery  was  gradually  devised  for  carrying  out 
the  relief  and  employment  of  the  poor.  Funds  for  this 
purpose  had  been  provided  by  the  collection  of  alms  in 
church;  but  by  an  Act  of  1562  the  mayor  of  each  town 
and  the  churchwardens  of  each  country  parish  were 
directed  to  draw  up  lis*<s  of  all  inhabitants  able  to  con- 
tribute to  such  a  fund,  and  on  a  persistent  refusal  the 
justices  in  session  were  empowered  to  assess  the  offender 
at  a  fitting  sum  end  to  enforce  its  payment  by  imprison- 
ment. 

The  principles  embodied  in  these  measures,  that  of  local 
responsibility  for  local  distress,  and  that  of  a  distinction 
between  the  pauper  and  the  vagabond,  were  more  clearly 
defined  in  a  statute  of  1572.  By  this  Act  the  justices  in 
the  country  districts  and  mayors  and  other  officers  in 
towns  were  directed  to  register  the  impotent  poor,  to  settle 
them  in  fitting  habitations  and  to  assess  all  inhabitants  for 
th«ir  support.  Overseers  were  appointed  to  enforce  and 


$88  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boos  VI. 


superintend  their  labor,  for  which  wool,  hemp,  flax,  or 
other  stuff  was  to  be  provided  at  the  expense  of  the  in- 
habitants; and  houses  of  correction  were  established  in 
every  county  for  obstinate  vagabonds  or  for  paupers  re- 
fusing to  work  at  the  overseers'  bidding.  A  subsequent 
Act  transferred  to  these  overseers  the  collection  of  the  poor 
rate,  and  powers  were  given  to  bind  poor  children  as  ap- 
prentices, to  erect  buildings  for  the  improvident  poor,  and 
to  force  the  parents  and  children  of  such  paupers  to  main- 
tain them.  The  well-known  Act  which  matured  and 
finally  established  this  system,  the  43d  of  Elizabeth,  re- 
mained the  base  of  our  system  of  pauper-administration 
until  a  time  within  the  recollection  of  living  men.  What- 
ever flaws  a  later  experience  has  found  in  these  measures, 
their  wise  and  humane  character  formed  a  striking  contrast 
to  the  legislation  which  had  degraded  our  statute-book 
from  the  date  of  the  Statute  of  Laborers ;  and  their  efficacy 
at  the  time  was  proved  by  the  cessation  of  the  social  danger 
against  which  they  were  intended  to  provide. 

\ts  cessation  however  was  owing,  not  merely  to  law,  but 
to  the  natural  growth  of  wealth  and  industry  throughout 
the  country.  A  middle  class  of  wealthier  landowners  and 
merchants  was  fast  rising  into  importance.  "  The  wealth 
of  the  meaner  sort,"  wrote  one  to  Cecil,  "  is  the  very  fount 
of  rebellion,  the  occasion  of  their  indolence,  of  the  con- 
tempt of  the  nobility,  and  of  the  hatred  they  have  con- 
ceived against  them."  But  Cecil  and  his  mistress  could 
watch  the  upgrowth  of  national  wealth  with  cooler  eyeso 
In  the  country  its  effect  was  to  undo  much  of  the  evil 
which  the  diminution  of  small  holdings  had  done.  What- 
ever social  embarrassment  it  might  bring  about,  the  revo- 
lution in  agriculture  which  Latimer  deplored  undoubtedly 
favored  production.  Not  only  was  a  larger  capital  brought 
to  bear  upon  the  land,  but  the  mere  change  in  the  system 
of  cultivation  introduced  a  taste  for  new  and  better  modes 
of  farming;  the  breed  of  horses  and  of  cattle  was  improved 
and  a  far  greater  use  made  of  manure  and  dressings.  One 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  389 

acre  under  the  new  system  produced,  it  was  said,  as  much 
as  two  under  the  old.  As  a  more  careful  and  constant 
cultivation  was  introduced,  a  greater  number  of  hands 
came  to  be  required  on  every  farm ;  and  much  of  the  sur- 
plus labor  which  had  been  flung  off  the  land  in  the  com- 
mencement of  the  new  system  was  thus  recalled  to  it. 

A  yet  more  efficient  agency  in  absorbing  the  unemployed 
was  found  in  the  development  of  manufactures.  The  linen 
trade  was  as  yet  of  small  value,  and  that  of  silk- weaving 
was  only  just  introduced.  But  the  woollen  manufacture 
was  fast  becoming  an  important  element  in  the  national 
wealth.  England  no  longer  sent  her  fleeces  to  be  woven 
in  Flanders  and  to  be  dyed  at  Florence.  The  spinning  of 
yarn,  the  weaving,  fulling,  and  dyeing  of  cloth,  were 
spreading  rapidly  from  the  towns  over  the  countryside. 
The  worsted  trade,  of  which  Norwich  was  the  centre,  ex- 
tended over  the  whole  of  the  Eastern  counties.  Farmers' 
wives  began  everywhere  to  spin  their  wool  from  their  own 
sheeps'  backs  into  a  coarse  "home-spun."  The  South  and 
the  West  however  still  remained  the  great  seats  of  industry 
and  of  wealth,  for  they  were  the  homes  of  mining  and 
manufacturing  activity.  The  iron  manufacturers  were 
limited  to  Kent  and  Sussex,  though  their  prosperity  in 
this  quarter  was  already  threatened  by  the  growing 
scarcity  of  the  wood  which  fed  their  furnaces,  and  by  the 
exhaustion  of  the  forests  of  the  Weald.  Cornwall  was 
then,  as  now,  the  sole  exporter  of  tin ;  and  the  exportation 
of  its  copper  was  just  beginning.  The  broadcloths  of  the 
West  claimed  the  palm  among  the  woollen  stuffs  of  Eng- 
land. The  Cinque  Ports  held  almost  a  monopoly  of  the 
commerce  of  the  Channel.  Every  little  harbor  from  the 
Foreland  to  the  Land's  End  sent  out  its  fleets  of  fishing 
boats,  manned  with  bold  seamen  who  were  to  furnish 
crews  for  Drake  and  the  Buccaneers.  Northern  England 
still  lagged  far  behind  the  rest  of  the  realm  in  its  industrial 
activity.  But  in  the  reign  of  Elizabeth  the  poverty  and 
inaction  to  which  it  had  been  doomed  for  so  many  centuries 


390  HISTORY  OP  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VL 

began  at  last  to  be  broken.  We  see  the  first  sign  of  the 
revolution  which  has  transferred  English  manufacturers 
and  English  wealth  to  the  north  of  the  Mersey  and  of  the 
Humber  in  the  mention  which  now  meets  us  of  the  friezes 
of  Manchester,  the  coverlets  of  York,  the  cutlery  of  Shef- 
field, and  the  cloth-trade  of  Halifax. 

The  growth  however  of  English  commerce  far  out- 
stripped as  yet  that  of  its  manufactures.  We  must  not 
judge  of  it  by  any  modern  standard ;  for  the  whole  popula- 
tion of  the  country  can  hardly  have  exceeded  five  or  six 
millions,  and  the  burden  of  all  the  vessels  engaged  in  or- 
dinary commerce  was  estimated  at  little  more  than  fifty 
thousand  tons.  The  size  of  the  vessels  employed  in  it 
would  nowadays  seem  insignificant;  a  modern  collier  brig 
is  probably  as  large  as  the  biggest  merchant  vessel  which 
then  sailed  from  the  port  of  London.  But  it  was  under 
Elizabeth  that  English  commerce  began  the  rapid  career 
of  development  which  has  made  us  the  carriers  of  the 
wojld.  The  foundation  of  the  Royal  Exchange  at  London 
by  Sir  Thomas  Gresham  in  1566  was  a  mark  of  the  com- 
mercial progress  of  the  time.  By  far  the  most  important 
branch  of  our  trade  was  the  commerce  with  Flanders. 
Antwerp  and  Bruges  were  in  fact  the  general  marts  of  the 
world  in  the  early  part  of  the  sixteenth  century,  and  the 
annual  export  of  English  wool  and  drapery  to  their  markets 
was  estimated  at  a  sum  of  more  than  two  millions  in  value. 
But  the  religious  troubles  of  the  Netherlands  were  already 
scaring  capital  and  industry  from  their  older  seats.  As 
early  as  1560  Philip's  envoy  reported  to  his  master  that 
"ten  thousand  of  your  Majesty's  servants  in  the  Low 
Countries  were  already  in  England  with  their  preachers 
and  ministers."  Alva's  severities  soon  raised  the  number 
of  refugees  to  fifty  thousand ;  and  the  outbreak  of  war 
which  followed  drove  trade  as  well  as  traders  from  the 
Low  Countries.  It  was  with  the  ruin  of  Antwerp  at  the 
time  of  its  siege  and  capture  by  the  Duke  of  Parma  that 
the  commercial  supremacy  of  our  own  capital  was  first 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  391 


established.  A  third  of  the  merchants  and  manufacturers 
of  the  ruined  city  are  said  to  have  found  a  refuge  on  the 
banks  of  the  Thames.  The  export  trade  to  Flanders  died 
away  as  London  developed  into  the  general  mart  of  Europe, 
where  the  gold  and  sugar  of  the  New  World  were  found 
side  by  side  with  the  cotton  of  India,  the  silks  of  the  East, 
and  the  woollen  stuffs  of  England  itself. 

Not  only  was  much  of  the  world's  older  trade  transferred 
by  this  change  to  English  shores,  but  the  burst  of  national 
vigor  which  characterized  the  time  found  new  outlets  for 
its  activity.  The  fisheries  grew  more  and  more  valuable. 
Those  of  the  Channel  and  the  German  Ocean  gave  occupa- 
tion to  the  ports  which  lined  the  coast  from  Yarmouth  to 
Plymouth  Haven ;  while  Bristol  and  Chester  were  rivals 
in  the  fisheries  of  Ulster.  The  merchant-navy  of  England 
was  fast  widening  its  sphere  of  commerce.  The  Venetian 
carrying  fleet  still  touched  at  Southampton;  but  as  far 
back  as  the  reign  of  Henry  the  Seventh  a  commercial 
treaty  had  been  concluded  with  Florence,  and  the  trade 
with  the  Mediterranean  which  began  under  Richard  the 
Third  constantly  took  a  wider  development.  The  trade 
between  England  and  the  Baltic  ports  had  hitherto  been 
conducted  by  the  Hanseatic  merchants ;  but  the  extinction 
at  this  time  of  their  London  depot,  the  Steel  Yard,  was  a 
sign  that  this  trade  too  had  now  passed  into  English  hands. 
The  growth  of  Boston  and  Hull  marked  an  increase  of  com- 
mercial intercourse  with  the  Scandinavian  states.  The 
prosperity  of  Bristol,  which  depended  in  great  measure  on 
the  trade  with  Ireland,  was  stimulated  by  the  conquest  and 
colonization  of  that  island  at  the  close  of  the  Queen's  reign 
and  the  beginning  of  her  successor's.  The  dream  of  a 
northern  passage  to  India  opened  up  a  trade  with  a  land 
as  yet  unknown.  Of  three  ships  which  sailed  in  the  reign 
of  Mary  under  Hugh  Willoughby  to  discover  this  passage, 
two  were  found  frozen  with  their  crews  and  their  hapless 
commander  on  the  coast  of  Lapland ;  but  the  third,  under 
Richard  Chancellor,  made  its  way  safely  to  the  White  Sea 


392  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

and  by  the  discovery  of  Archangel  created  the  trade  with 
Russia.  A  more  lucrative  traffic  had  already  begun  with 
the  coast  of  Guinea,  to  whose  gold  dust  and  ivory  the 
merchants  of  Southampton  owed  their  wealth.  The  guilt 
of  the  Slave  Trade  which  sprang  out  of  it  rests  with  John 
Hawkins.  In  1562  he  returned  from  the  African  coast 
with  a  cargo  of  negroes ;  and  the  arms,  whose  grant  re- 
warded this  achievement  (a  demi-moor,  proper,  bound 
with  a  cord),  commemorated  his  priority  in  the  transport 
of  slaves  to  the  labor-fields  of  the  New  World.  But  the 
New  World  was  already  furnishing  more  honest  sources  of 
wealth.  The  voyage  of  Sebastian  Cabot  from  Bristol  to 
The  mainland  of  North  America  had  called  English  vessels 
lo  the  stormy  ocean  of  the  North.  From  the  time  of 
Henry  the  Eighth  the  number  of  English  boats  engaged 
on  the  cod-banks  of  Newfoundland  steadily  increased,  and 
at  the  close  of  Elizabeth's  reign  the  seamen  of  Biscay  found 
English  rivals  in  the  whale-fishery  of  the  Polar  seas. 

Elizabeth  lent  a  ready  patronage  to  the  new  commerce, 
she  shared  in  its  speculations,  she  considered  its  extension 
and  protection  as  a  part  of  public  policy,  and  she  sanc- 
tioned the  formation  of  the  great  Merchant  Companies 
which  could  alone  secure  the  trader  against  wrong  or  in- 
justice in  distant  countries.  The  Merchant- Adventurers 
of  London,  a  body  which  had  existed  long  before,  and  had 
received  a  charter  of  incorporation  under  Henry  the 
Seventh,  furnished  a  model  for  the  Russia  Company  and 
the  Company  which  absorbed  the  new  commerce  to  the 
Indies.  But  it  was  not  wholly  with  satisfaction  that 
•dther  the  Queen  or  her  ministers  watched  the  social 
change  which  wealth  was  producing  around  them.  They 
feared  the  increased  expenditure  and  comfort  which  neces- 
sarily followed  it,  as  likely  to  impoverish  the  land  and  to 
eat  out  the  hardihood  of  the  people.  "  England  spendeth 
more  on  wines  in  one  year,"  complained  Cecil,  "  than  it  did 
in  ancient  times  in  four  years."  In  the  upper  classes  the 
lavishness  of  a  new  wealth  combined  with  a  lavishness  of 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  393 

life,  a  love  of  beauty,  of  color,  of  display,  to  revolutionize 
English  dress.  Men  "wore  a  manor  on  their  backs.'* 
The  Queen's  three  thousand  robes  were  rivalled  in  their 
bravery  by  the  slashed  velvets,  the  ruffs,  the  jewelled  pur- 
points  of  the  courtiers  around  her.  But  signs  of  the 
growing  wealth  were  as  evident  in  the  lower  class  as  in  the 
higher.  The  disuse  of  salt-fish  and  the  greater  consump- 
tion of  meat  marked  the  improvement  which  had  taken 
place  among  the  country  folk.  Their  rough  and  wattled 
farm-houses  were  being  superseded  by  dwellings  of  brick 
and  stone.  Pewter  was  replacing  the  wooden  trenchers  of 
the  early  yeomanry,  and  there  were  yeomen  who  could 
boast  of  a  fair  show  of  silver  plate.  It  is  from  this  period 
indeed  that  we  can  first  date  the  rise  of  a  conception  which 
seems  to  us  now  a  peculiarly  English  one,  the  conception 
of  domestic  comfort.  The  chimnev-corner,  so  closely  asso- 
ciated with  family  life,  came  into  existence  with  the  gen- 
eral introduction  of  chimneys,  a  feature  rare  in  ordinary 
houses  at  the  beginning  of  this  reign.  Pillows,  which  had 
before  been  despised  by  the  farmer  and  the  trader  as  fit 
only  "for  women  in  child-bed,"  were  now  in  general  use. 
Carpets  superseded  the  filthy  flooring  of  rushes.  The 
loftier  houses  of  the  wealthier  merchants,  their  parapeted 
fronts  and  costly  wainscoting,  their  cumbrous  but  elabo- 
rate beds,  their  carved  staircases,  their  quaintly  figured 
gables,  not  only  contrasted  with  the  squalor  which  had  till 
then  characterized  English  towns,  but  marked  the  rise  01 
a  new  middle  class  which  was  to  play  its  part  in  later 
history. 

A  transformation  of  an  even  more  striking  kind  marked 
the  extinction  of  the  feudal  character  of  the  noblesse. 
Gloomy  walls  and  serried  battlements  disappeared  from 
the  dwellings  of  the  gentry.  The  strength  of  the  mediaeval 
fortress  gave  way  to  the  pomp  and  grace  of  the  Elizabethan 
Hall.  Knole,  Longleat,  Burleigh  and  Hatfield,  Hardwick 
and  Audley  End,  are  familiar  instances  of  a  social  as  well 
as  an  architectural  change  which  covered  England  with 


394  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

buildings  where  the  thought  of  defence  was  abandoned  for 
that  of  domestic  comfort  and  refinement.  We  still  gaze 
with  pleasure  on  their  picturesque  line  of  gables,  their 
fretted  fronts,  their  gilded  turrets  and  fanciful  vanes,  their 
castellated  gateways,  the  jutting  oriels  from  which  the 
great  noble  looked  down  on  his  new  Italian  garden,  on  its 
stately  terraces  and  broad  flights  of  steps,  its  vases  and 
fountains,  its  quaint  masses,  its  formal  walks,  its  lines  of 
yews  cut  into  grotesque  shapes  in  hopeless  rivalry  of  the 
cypress  avenues  of  the  South.  Nor  was  the  change  less 
within  than  without.  The  life  of  the  Middle  Ages  con- 
centrated itself  in  the  vast  castle  hall,  where  the  baron 
looked  from  his  upper  dais  on  the  retainers  who  gathered 
at  his  board.  But  the  great  households  were  fast  break- 
ing up ;  and  the  whole  feudal  economy  disappeared  when 
tin  lord  of  the  household  withdrew  with  his  family  into 
his  "  parlor"  or  "  withdra wing-room"  and  left  the  hall  to 
his  dependants.  The  Italian  refinement  of  life  which  told 
on  pleasance  and  garden  told  on  the  remodelling  of  the 
house  within,  raised  the  principal  apartments  to  an  upper 
floor — a  change  to  which  we  owe  the  grand  staircases  of 
the  time — surrounded  the  quiet  courts  by  long  "  galleries 
of  the  presence,"  crowned  the  rude  hearth  with  huge 
chimney-pieces  adorned  with  fauns  and  cupids,  with 
quaintly  interlaced  monograms  and  fantastic  arabesques, 
hung  tapestries  on  the  walls,  and  crowded  each  chamber 
with  quaintly  carved  chairs  and  costly  cabinets.  The 
prodigal  use  of  glass  became  a  marked  feature  in  the 
domestic  architecture  of  the  time,  and  one  whose  influence 
on  the  general  health  of  the  people  can  hardly  be  over-rated. 
Long  lines  of  windows  stretched  over  the  fronts  of  the  new 
manor  halls.  Every  merchant's  house  had  its  oriel. 
"You  shall  have  sometimes,"  Lord  Bacon  grumbled, 
"  your  houses  so  full  of  glass,  that  we  cannot  tell  where  to 
oome  to  be  out  of  the  sun  or  the  cold." 

What  Elizabeth  contributed  to  this  upgrowth  of  national 
prosperity  was  the  peace  and  social  order  from  which  it 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION     1540—1608.  396 

sprang.  While  autos-da-fe  were  blazing  at  Rome  and 
Madrid,  while  the  Inquisition  was  driving  the  sober 
traders  of  the  Netherlands  to  madness,  while  Scotland 
was  tossing  with  religious  strife,  while  the  policy  of 
Catharine  secured  for  France  but  a  brief  respite  from  the 
horrors  of  civil  war,  England  remained  untroubled  and  at 
peace.  Religious  order  was  little  disturbed.  Recusants 
were  few.  There  was  little  cry  as  yet  for  freedom  of  wor- 
ship. Freedom  of  conscience  was  the  right  of  every  man. 
Persecution  had  ceased.  It  was  only  as  the  tale  of  & 
darker  past  that  men  recalled  how  ten  years  back  heretics 
had  been  sent  to  the  fire.  Civil  order  was  even  more  pro- 
found than  religious  order.  The  failure  of  the  northern 
revolt  proved  the  political  tranquillity  of  the  country.  The 
social  troubles  from  vagrancy  and  evictions  were  slowly 
passing  away.  Taxation  was  light.  The  country  was 
firmly  and  steadily  governed.  The  popular  favor  which 
had  met  Elizabeth  at  her  accession  was  growing  into  a 
passionate  devotion.  Of  her  faults  indeed  England  be- 
yond the  circle  of  her  court  knew  little  or  nothing.  The 
shiftings  of  her  diplomacy  were  never  seen  outside  the 
royal  closet.  The  nation  at  large  could  only  judge  her 
foreign  policy  by  its  main  outlines,  by  its  temperance  and 
good  sense,  and  above  all  by  its  success.  But  every  Eng- 
lishman was  able  to  judge  Elizabeth  in  her  rule  at  home, 
in  her  love  of  peace,  her  instinct  of  order,  the  firmness  and 
moderation  of  her  government,  the  judicious  spirit  of  con- 
ciliation and  compromise  among  warring  factions  which 
gave  the  country  an  unexampled  tranquillity  at  a  time  when 
almost  every  other  country  in  Europe  was  torn  with  civil 
war.  Every  sign  of  the  growing  prosperity,  the  sight  of 
London  as  it  became  the  mart  of  the  world,  of  stately 
mansions  as  they  rose  on  every  manor,  told,  and  justly 
told,  in  the  Queen's  favor.  Her  statue  in  the  centre  of 
the  London  Exchange  was  a  tribute  on  the  part  of  the 
merchant  class  to  the  interest  with  which  she  watched  and 
shared  personally  in  its  enterprises.  Her  thrift  won  a 


396  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH   PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

general  gratitude.  The  memories  of  the  Terror  and  of  the 
Martyrs  threw  into  bright  relief  the  aversion  from  blood- 
shed which  was  conspicuous  in  her  earlier  reign,  and  never 
wholly  waning  through  its  fiercer  close.  Above  all,  there 
was  a  general  confidence  in  her  instinctive  knowledge  of 
the  national  temper.  Her  finger  was  always  on  the  public 
pulse.  She  knew  exactly  when  she  could  resist  the  feeling 
of  her  people,  and  when  she  must  give  way  before  the  new 
sentiment  of  freedom  which  her  policy  unconsciously  fos- 
tered. But  when  she  retreated,  her  defeat  had  all  the  grace ' 
of  victory;  and  the  frankness  and  unreserve  of  her  sur- 
render won  back  at  once  the  love  that  her  resistance  lost. 
Her  attitude  at  home  in  fact  was  that  of  a  woman  whose 
pride  in  the  well-being  of  her  subjects  and  whose  longing 
for  their  favor  was  the  one  warm  touch  in  the  coldness  of 
her  natural  temper.  If  Elizabeth  could  be  said  to  love 
anything,  she  loved  England.  "Xothing,"  she  said  to  her 
first  Parliament  in  words  of  unwonted  fire,  "nothing,  no 
worldly  thing  under  the  sun,  is  so  dear  to  me  as  the  love 
and  good-will  of  my  subjects."  And  the  love  and  good-will 
which  were  so  dear  to  her  she  fully  won. 

It  was  this  personal  devotion  that  enabled  Elizabeth  to 
face  the  religious  difficulties  of  her  reign.  Formidable  as 
these  had  been  from  its  outset,  they  were  now  growing 
into  actual  dangers.  The  attack  of  the  Papacy  from  with- 
out had  deepened  the  tide  of  religious  fanaticism  within. 
For  the  nation  at  large  Elizabeth's  system  was  no  doubt 
a  wise  and  healthy  one.  Single-handed,  unsupported  by 
any  of  the  statesmen  or  divines  about  her,  the  Queen  had 
forced  on  the  warring  religions  a  sort  of  armed  truce. 
While  the  main  principles  of  the  Reformation  were  accepted 
the  zeal  of  the  ultra-reformers  was  held  at  bay.  Outer 
conformity,  attendance  at  the  common  prayer,  was  exacted 
from  all,  but  changes  in  ritual  which  would  have  drawn 
attention  to  the  change  in  religion  were  steadily  resisted. 
The  Bible  was  left  open.  Public  discussion  was  unre- 
strained. On  the  other  hand,  the  warfare  of  pulpit  against 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  397 

pulpit  was  silenced  by  the  licensing  of  preachers.  In  1567 
Elizabeth  gave  the  Protestant  zealots  a  rough  proof  that 
she  would  not  suffer  them  to  draw  the  Catholics  into  con- 
troversy and  rouse  the  opposition  to  her  system  which 
controversy  could  not  fail  to  bring  with  it.  Parker's  suc- 
cessor, Archbishop  Grindal,  who  had  been  one  of  the 
Marian  exiles  and  returned  with  much  of  the  Calvinistio 
fanaticism,  showed  favor  to  a  "  liberty  of  prophesying"  or 
preaching  which  would  have  flooded  the  realm  with  Prot- 
estant disputants.  Elizabeth  at  once  interposed.  The 
"  liberty  of  prophesying"  was  brought  to  an  end ;  even  the 
number  of  licensed  preachers  was  curtailed ;  and  the  Pri- 
mate himself  was  suspended  from  the  exercise  of  his  func- 
tions. 

No  stronger  proof  could  have  been  given  of  the  Queen's 
resolve  to  watch  jealously  over  the  religious  peace  of  her 
realm.  In  her  earlier  years  such  a  resolve  went  fairly 
with  the  general  temper  of  the  people  at  large.  The  mass 
of  Englishmen  remained  true  in  sentiment  to  the  older 
creed.  But  they  conformed  to  the  new  worship.  They 
shrank  from  any  open  defiance  of  the  government.  They 
shrank  from  reawakening  the  fierce  strife  of  religions,  of 
calling  back  the  horsemen  of  Somerset  or  the  fires  of  Mary. 
They  saw  little  doctrinal  difference  between  the  new  prayer 
atod  the  old.  Above  all  they  trusted  to  patience.  They 
had  seen  too  many  religious  revolutions  to  believe  that 
any  revolution  would  be  lasting.  They  believed  that  the 
changes  would  be  undone  again  as  they  had  been  undone 
before.  They  held  that  Elizabeth  was  only  acting  under 
pressure,  and  that  her  real  inclination  was  toward  the  old 
religion.  They  trusted  in  Philip's  influence,  in  an  Aus- 
trian marriage,  in  the  Queen's  dread  of  a  breach  with  the 
Papacy,  in  the  pressure  of  Mary  Stuart.  And  meanwhile 
the  years  went  by,  and  as  the  memories  of  the  past  became 
dimmer,  and  custom  laid  a  heavier  and  heavier  hand  on 
the  mass  of  men,  and  a  new  generation  grew  up  that 
had  never  known  the  spell  of  Catholicism,  the  nation  drifted 


398  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

from  its  older  tradition  and  became  Protestant  in  its  own 
despite. 

It  was  no  doubt  a  sense  that  the  religious  truce  was  do- 
ing their  work,  as  well  as  a  dread  of  alienating  the  Queen 
and  throwing  her  into  the  hands  of  their  opponents  by  a 
more  violent  pressure,  which  brought  the  more  zealous  re- 
formers to  acquiesce  through  Elizabeth's  earlier  years  in 
this  system  of  compromise.  But  it  was  no  sooner  de- 
nounced by  the  Papacy  than  it  was  attacked  by  the  Puri- 
tans. The  rebellion  of  the  Northern  Earls,  the  withdrawal 
from  the  public  worship,  the  Bull  of  Deposition,  roused  a 
fanatical  zeal  among  the  Calvinistic  party  which  predomi- 
nated in  the  Parliament  of  1571.  The  movement  in  favor 
of  a  more  pronounced  Protestantism,  of  a  more  utter  break 
with  the  Catholic  past,  which  had  slowly  spread  from  the 
knot  of  exiles  who  returned  to  Geneva,  now  gathered  a 
new  strength ;  and  a  bill  was  brought  in  for  the  reform  of 
the  book  of  Common  Prayer  by  the  omission  of  the  prac- 
tices which  displeased  the  Genevan  party  among  the  clergy. 
A  yet  closer  approach  to  the  theocratic  system  of  Calvin 
was  seen  when  the  Lower  House  refused  its  assent  to  a 
statute  that  would  have  bound  the  clergy  to  subscribe  to 
those  articles  which  recognized  the  royal  supremacy,  the 
power  of  the  Church  to  ordain  rites  and  ceremonies,  and 
the  actual  form  of  church  government.  At  such  a  crisis 
even  the  weightiest  statesmen  at  Elizabeth's  council-board 
believed  that  in  the  contest  with  Rome  the  Crown  would 
have  to  rely  on  Protestant  zeal,  and  the  influence  of  Cecil 
and  Walsingham  backed  the  pressure  of  the  Parliament. 
But  the  Queen  was  only  stirred  to  a  burst  of  anger;  she 
ordered  Strickland,  who  had  introduced  the  bill  for  litur- 
gical reform,  to  appear  no  more  in  Parliament,  and  though 
she  withdrew  the  order  as  soon  as  she  perceived  the  House 
was  bent  on  his  restoration,  she  would  hear  nothing  of 
the  changes  on  which  the  Commons  were  set. 

Her  resistance  showed  the  sagacity  with  which  the 
Queen  caught  the  general  temper  of  her  people.  The 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  399 

Catholic  pressure  had  made  it  needful  to  exclude  Catholics 
from  the  Commons  and  from  the  council-board,  but  a 
Protestant  Council  and  a  Protestant  Parliament  were  by 
no  means  fair  representatives  of  the  general  drift  of  Eng- 
lish opinion.  Her  religious  indifference  left  Elizabeth  a 
better  judge  of  the  timid  and  hesitating  advance  of  relig- 
ious sentiment,  of  the  stubborn  clinging  to  the  past,  of  the 
fear  of  change,  of  the  dread  of  revolution,  which  made  the 
winning  of  the  people  as  a  whole  to  the  Reformation  a 
slow  and  tedious  process.  The  Protestants  were  increas- 
ing in  number,  but  they  were  still  a  minority  of  the  na- 
tion. The  zealous  Catholics,  who  withdrew  from  church 
at  the  Pope's  bidding,  were  a  still  smaller  minority.  The 
bulk  of  Englishmen  were  striving  to  cling  to  their  relig- 
ious prejudice  and  to  loyalty  as  well,  to  obey  their  con- 
science and  their  Queen  at  once,  and  in  such  a  temper  of 
men's  minds  any  sudden  and  decisive  change  would  have 
fallen  like  a  thunderbolt.  Elizabeth  had  no  will  to  follow 
in  the  track  of  Rome,  and  to  help  the  Pope  to  drive  every 
waverer  into  action.  Weakened  and  broken  as  it  was,  she 
clung  obstinately  to  her  system  of  compromise ;  and  the 
general  opinion  gave  her  a  strength  which  enabled  her  to 
resist  the  pressure  of  her  council  and  her  Parliament.  So 
difficult  however  was  her  position  that  a  change  might 
have  been  forced  on  her  had  she  not  been  aided  at  this  mo- 
ment by  a  group  of  clerical  bigots  who  gathered  under  the 
banner  of  Presbyterianism. 

Of  these  Thomas  Cartwright  was  the  chief.  He  had 
studied  at  Geneva ;  he  returned  with  a  fanatical  faith  in 
Calvinism,  and  in  the  system  of  Church  government 
which  Calvin  had  devised ;  and  as  Margaret  Professor  of 
Divinity  at  Cambridge  he  used  to  the  full  the  opportuni- 
ties which  his  chair  gave  him  of  propagating  his  opinions. 
No  leader  of  a  religious  party  ever  deserved  less  of  after 
sympathy.  Cartwright  was  unquestionably  learned  and 
devout,  but  his  bigotry  was  that  of  a  mediaeval  inquisitor. 
The  relics  of  the  old  ritual,  the  cross  in  baptism,  the  sur- 


400  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

plice,  the  giving  of  a  ring  in  marriage,  were  to  him  not 
merely  distasteful,  as  they  were  to  the  Puritans  at  large, 
they  were  idolatrous  and  the  mark  of  the  beast.  His  dec- 
lamation against  ceremonies  and  superstition  however  had 
little  weight  with  Elizabeth  or  her  Primates ;  what  scared 
them  was  his  reckless  advocacy  of  a  scheme  of  ecclesias- 
tical government  which  placed  the  State  beneath  the  feet 
of  the  Church.  The  absolute  rule  of  bishops  indeed  Cart- 
wright  denounced  as  begotten  of  the  devil ;  but  the  abso- 
lute rule  of  Presbyters  he  held  to  be  established  by  the 
word  of  God.  For  the  Church  modelled  after  the  fashion 
of  Geneva  he  claimed  an  authority  which  surpassed  the 
wildest  dreams  of  the  masters  of  the  Vatican.  All  spiritual 
authority  and  jurisdiction,  the  decreeing  of  doctrine,  the 
ordering  of  ceremonies,  lay  wholly  in  the  hands  of  the 
ministers  of  the  Church.  To  them  belonged  the  super- 
vision of  public  morals.  In  an  ordered  arrangement  of 
classes  and  synods,  these  Presbyters  were  to  govern  their 
flocks,  to  regulate  their  own  order,  to  decide  in  matters  of 
faith,  to  administer  "  discipline. "  Their  weapon  was  ex- 
communication, and  they  were  responsible  for  its  use  to 
none  but  Christ.  The  province  of  the  civil  ruler  in  such 
a  system  of  religion  as  this  was  simply  to  carry  out  the 
decisions  of  the  Presbyters,  "  to  see  their  decrees  executed 
and  to  punish  the  contemners  of  them."  Nor  was  this 
work  of  the  civil  power  likely  to  be  a  light  work.  The 
spirit  of  Calvinistic  Presbyterianism  excluded  all  toleration 
of  practice  or  belief.  Not  only  was  the  rule  of  ministers 
to  be  established  as  the  one  legal  form  of  Church  govern- 
ment, but  all  other  forms,  Episcopalian  and  Separatist, 
were  to  be  ruthlessly  put  down.  For  heresy  there  was  the 
punishment  of  death.  Never  had  the  doctrine  of  persecu- 
tion been  urged  with  such  a  blind  and  reckless  ferocity. 
"I  deny,"  wrote  Cartwright,  "that  upon  repentance  there 
ought  to  follow  any  pardon  of  death.  .  .  .  Heretics 
ought  to  be  put  to  death  now.  If  this  be  bloody  and  ex- 
treme, I  am  content  to  be  so  counted  with  the  Holy  Ghost." 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  401 

The  violence  of  language  such  as  this  was  as  unlikely  as 
the  dogmatism  of  his  theological  teaching  to  commend 
Cartwright's  opinions  to  the  mass  of  Englishmen.  Popu- 
lar as  the  Presbyterian  system  became  in  Scotland,  it  never 
took  any  popular  hold  on  England.  It  remained  to  the 
last  a  clerical  rather  than  a  national  creed,  and  even  in  the 
moment  of  its  seeming  triumph  under  the  Commonwealth 
it  was  rejected  by  every  part  of  England  save  London  and 
Lancashire.  But  the  bold  challenge  which  Cartwright's 
party  delivered  to  the  Government  in  1572  in  an  "admoni- 
tion to  the  Parliament,"  which  denounced  the  government 
of  bishops  as  contrary  to  the  word  of  God  and  demanded 
the  establishment  in  its  place  of  government  by  Presby- 
ters, raised  a  panic  among  English  statesmen  and  prelates 
which  cut  off  all  hopes  of  a  quiet  treatment  of  the  merely 
ceremonial  questions  which  really  troubled  the  conscience 
of  the  more  advanced  Protestants.  The  natural  progress 
of  opinion  abruptly  ceased,  and  the  moderate  thinkers  who 
had  pressed  for  a  change  in  ritual  which  would  have  satis- 
fied the  zeal  of  the  reformers  withdrew  from  union  with  a 
party  which  revived  the  worst  pretensions  of  the  Papacy. 
But  the  eyes  of  Elizabeth  as  of  her  subjects  were  drawn 
from  difficulties  at  home  to  the  conflict  which  took  fresh 
fire  oversea.  In  Europe,  as  in. England,  the  tide  of  relig- 
ious passion  which  had  so  long  been  held  in  check  was 
now  breaking  over  the  banks  which  restrained  it;  and 
with  this  outbreak  of  forces  before  which  the  diplomacy 
and  intrigues  of  its  statesmen  fell  powerless  the  political 
face  of  Europe  was  changed.  In  1572  the  power  of  the 
King  of  Spain  had  reached  its  height.  The  Netherlands 
were  at  his  feet.  In  the  East  his  troubles  from  the  pressure 
of  the  Turks  seemed  brought  to  an  end  by  a  brilliant  vic- 
tory at  Lepanto  in  which  his  fleet  with  those  of  Venice 
and  the  Pope  annihilated  the  fleet  of  the  Sultan.  He  could 
throw  his  whole  weight  upon  the  Calvinism  of  the  West, 
and  above  all  upon  France,  where  the  Guises  were  fast 
sinking  into  mere  partisans  of  Spain.  The  common  danger 


402  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

drew  France  and  England  together;  and  Catharine  of 
Medicis  strove  to  bind  the  two  countries  in  one  political 
action  by  offering  to  Elizabeth  the  hand  of  her  son  Henry, 
the  Duke  of  Anjou.  But  at  this  moment  of  danger  the 
whole  situation  was  changed  by  the  rising  of  the  Nether- 
lands. Driven  to  despair  by  the  greed  and  persecution  of 
Alva,  the  Low  Countries  rose  in  a  revolt  which  after 
strange  alternations  of  fortune  gave  to  the  world  the  Re- 
public of  the  United  Provinces.  Of  the  Protestants  driven 
out  by  the  Duke's  cruelties,  many  had  taken  to  the  seas 
and  cruised  as  pirates  in  the  Channel,  making  war  on 
Spanish  vessels  under  the  flag  of  the  Prince  of  Orange. 
Like  the  Huguenot  privateers  who  had  sailed  under  Conde's 
flag,  these  freebooters  found  shelter  in  the  English  ports. 
But  in  the  spring  of  1572  Alva  demanded  their  expulsion; 
and  Elizabeth,  unable  to  resist,  sent  them  orders  to  put  to 
sea.  The  Duke's  success  proved  fatal  to  his  master's 
cause.  The  "water-beggars,"  a  little  band  of  some  two 
hundred  and  fifty  men,  were  driven  by  stress  of  weather 
into  the  Meuse.  There  they  seized  the  city  of  Brill,  and 
repulsed  a  Spanish  force  which  strove  to  re-capture  it. 
The  repulse  was  the  signal  for  a  general  rising.  All  the 
great  cities  of  Holland  and  Zealand  drove  out  their  garri- 
sons. The  northern  Provinces  of  Gelderland,  Overyssel, 
and  Friesland,  followed  their  example,  and  by  the  summer 
half  of  the  Low  Countries  were  in  revolt. 

A  yet  greater  danger  threatened  Alva  in  the  south,  where 
Mons  had  been  surprised  by  Lewis  of  Nassau,  and  where 
the  Calvinists  were  crying  for  support  from  the  Huguenots 
of  France.  The  opening  which  their  rising  afforded  was 
seized  by  the  Huguenot  leaders  as  a  political  engine  to 
break  the  power  which  Catharine  of  Medicis  exercised 
over  Charles  the  Ninth,  and  to  set  aside  her  policy  of  re- 
ligious balance  by  placing  France  at  the  head  of  Protest- 
antism in  the  West.  Weak  and  passionate  in  temper, 
jealous  of  the  warlike  fame  which  his  brother,  the  D«ke 
of  Anjou,  had  won  at  Montcontour,  dreading  above  all 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  403 

the  power  of  Spain  and  eager  to  grasp  the  opportunity  of 
breaking  it  by  a  seizure  of  the  Netherlands,  Charles  lis- 
tened to  the  counsels  of  Coligni,  who  pressed  for  war  upon 
Philip  and  promised  the  support  of  the  Huguenots  in  an 
invasion  of  the  Low  Countries.  Never  had  a  fairer  pros- 
pect opened  to  French  ambition.  But  Catharine  had  no 
mind  to  be  set  aside.  To  her  cool  political  temper  the 
supremacy  of  the  Huguenots  seemed  as  fatal  to  the  Crown 
as  the  supremacy  of  the  Catholics.  A  triumph  of  Calvin- 
ism in  the  Netherlands,  wrought  out  by  the  swords  of  the 
French  Calvinists,  would  decide  not  only  the  religious  but 
the  political  destinies  of  France ;  and  Catharine  saw  ruin 
for  the  monarchy  in  a  France  at  once  Protestant  and  free. 
She  suddenly  united  with  the  Guises  and  suffered  them  to 
rouse  the  fanatical  mob  of  Paris,  while  she  won  back  the 
King  by  picturing  the  royal  power  as  about  to  pass  into 
the  hands  of  Coligni.  On  the  twenty-fourth  of  August, 
St.  Bartholomew's  day,  the  plot  broke  out  in  an  awful 
massacre.  At  Paris  the  populace  murdered  Coligni  and  al- 
most all  the  Huguenot  leaders.  A  hundred  thousand  Prot- 
estants fell  as  the  fury  spread  from  town  to  town.  In  that 
awful  hour  Philip  and  Catholicism  were  saved.  The 
Spanish  King  laughed  for  joy.  The  new  Pope,  Gregory 
the  Thirteenth,  ordered  a  Te  Deum  to  be  sung.  Instead 
of  conquering  the  Netherlands  France  plunged  madly  back 
into  a  chaos  of  civil  war,  and  the  Low  Countries  were  left 
to  cope  single-handed  with  the  armies  of  Spain. 

They  could  look  for  no  help  from  Elizabeth.  Whatever 
enthusiasm  the  heroic  struggle  of  the  Prince  of  Orange  for 
their  liberties  excited  among  her  subjects,  it  failed  to  move 
Elizabeth  even  for  an  instant  from  the  path  of  cold  self- 
interest.  To  her  the  revolt  of  the  Netherlands  was  simply 
"a  bridle  of  Spain,  which  kept  war  out  of  our  own  gate." 
At  the  darkest  moment  of  the  contest,  when  Alva  had  won 
back  all  but  Holland  and  Zealand  and  even  William  of 
Orange  despaired,  the  Queen  bent  her  energies  to  prevent 
him  from  finding  succor  in  France.  That  the  Low  Coun- 


404  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

tries  could  in  the  end  withstand  Philip,  neither  she  nor 
any  English  statesmen  believed.  They  held  that  the 
struggle  must  close  either  in  their  subjection  to  him,  or  in 
their  selling  themselves  for  aid  to  France:  and  the  acces- 
sion of  power  which  either  result  must  give  to  one  of  her 
two  Catholic  foes  the  Queen  was  eager  to  avert.  Her  plan 
for  averting  it  was  by  forcing  the  Provinces  to  accept  the 
terms  which  were  now  offered  by  Alva's  successor,  Re- 
quesens,  a  restoration  of  their  constitutional  privileges  on 
condition  of  their  submission  to  the  Church.  Peace  on 
such  a  footing  would  not  only  restore  English  commerce, 
which  suffered  from  the  war ;  it  would  leave  the  Nether- 
lands still  formidable  as  a  weapon  against  Philip.  The 
freedom  of  the  Provinces  would  be  saved ;  and  the  relig- 
ious question  involved  in  a  fresh  submission  to  the  yoke  of 
Catholicism  was  one  which  Elizabeth  was  incapable  of  ap- 
preciating. To  her  the  steady  refusal  of  William  the 
Silent  to  sacrifice  his  faith  was  as  unintelligible  as  the 
steady  bigotry  of  Philip  in  demanding  such  a  sacrifice. 
It  was  of  more  immediate  consequence  that  Philip's  anxi- 
ety to  avoid  provoking  an  intervention  on  the  part  of  Eng- 
land left  Elizabeth  tranquil  at  home.  The  policy  of  Re- 
quesens  after  Alva's  departure  at  the  close  of  1573  was  a 
policy  of  pacification ;  and  with  the  steady  resistance  of 
the  Netherlands  still  foiling  his  efforts  Philip  saw  that  his 
one  hope  of  success  rested  on  the  avoidance  of  intervention 
from  without.  The  civil  war  which  followed  the  massacre 
of  St.  Bartholomew  removed  all  danger  of  such  an  inter- 
vention on  the  side  of  France.  A  weariness  of  religious 
strife  enabled  Catharine  again  to  return  to  her  policy  of 
toleration  in  the  summer  of  1573;  but  though  the  death  of 
Charles  the  Ninth  and  accession  of  his  brother  Henry  the 
'Third  in  the  following  year  left  the  Queen-mother's  power 
unbroken,  the  balance  she  preserved  was  too  delicate  to 
leave  room  for  any  schemes  without  the  realm. 

English  intervention  it  was  yet  more  needful  to  avoid ; 
and  the  hopes  of  an  attack  upon  England  which  Rome  had 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  405 

drawn  from  Philip's  fanaticism  were  thus  bitterly  blasted. 
To  the  fiery  exhortations  of  Gregory  the  Thirteenth  the 
King  only  answered  by  counsels  of  delay.  But  Rome 
could  not  delay  her  efforts.  All  her  hopes  of  recovering 
England  lay  in  the  Catholic  sympathies  of  the  mass  of 
Englishmen,  and  every  year  that  went  by  weakened  her 
chance  of  victory.  The  firm  refusal  of  Elizabeth  to  suffer 
the  Puritans  to  break  in  with  any  violent  changes  on  her 
ecclesiastical  policy  was  justified  by  its  slow  but  steady 
success.  Silently,  almost  unconsciously,  England  became 
Protestant  as  the  traditionary  Catholicism  which  formed 
the  religion  of  three-fourths  of  the  people  at  the  Queen's 
accession  died  quietly  away.  At  the  close  of  her  reign  the 
only  parts  of  England  where  the  old  faith  retained  any- 
thing of  its  former  vigor  were  the  north  and  the  extreme 
west,  at  that  time  the  poorest  and  least  populated  parts  of 
the  kingdom.  One  main  cause  of  the  change  lay  in  the 
gradual  dying  out  or  removal  of  the  Catholic  priesthood 
and  the  growth  of  a  new  Protestant  clergy  who  supplied 
their  place.  The  older  parish  priests,  though  they  had  al 
most  to  a  man  acquiesced  in  the  changes  of  ritual  and  doc- 
trine which  the  various  phases  of  the  Reformation  imposed 
upon  them,  remained  in  heart  utterly  hostile  to  its  spirit. 
As  Mary  had  undone  the  changes  of  Edward,  they  hoped 
for  a  Catholic  successor  to  undo  the  changes  of  Elizabeth ; 
and  in  the  mean  time  they  were  content  to  wear  the  sur- 
plice instead  of  the  chasuble,  and  to  use  the  Communion 
office  instead  of  the  Mass-book.  But  if  they  were  forced 
to  read  the  Homilies  from  the  pulpit  the  spirit  of  their 
teaching  remained  unchanged;  and  it  was  easy  for  them 
to  cast  contempt  on  the  new  services,  till  they  seemed  to 
old-fashioned  worshippers  a  mere  "  Christmas  game. "  But 
the  lapse  of  years  did  its  work  in  emptying  parsonage  after 
parsonage.  In  1579  the  Queen  felt  strong  enough  to  en- 
force for  the  first  time  a  general  compliance  with  the  Act 
of  Uniformity ;  and  the  jealous  supervision  of  Parker  and 
the  bishops  insured  an  inner  as  well  as  an  outer  conformity 


40fc  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE      [BOOK  VL 

to  the  established  faith  in  the  clergy  who  took  the  place  of 
the  dying  priesthood.  The  new  parsons  were  for  the  most 
part  not  merely  Protestant  in  belief  and  teaching,  but 
ultra- Protestant.  The  old  restrictions  on  the  use  of  the 
pulpit  were  silently  removed  as  the  need  for  them  passed 
away,  and  the  zeal  of  the  young  ministers  showed  itself  in 
an  assiduous  preaching  which  moulded  in  their  own  fashion 
the  religious  ideas  of  the  new  generation.  But  their  char- 
acter had  even  a  greater  influence  than  their  preaching. 
Under  Henry  the  priests  had  in  large  part  been  ignorant 
and  sensual  men ;  and  the  character  of  the  clergy  appointed 
by  the  greedy  Protestants  under  Edward  or  at  the  opening 
of  Elizabeth's  reign  was  even  worse  than  that  of  their 
Catholic  rivals.  But  the  energy  of  the  successive  Pri- 
mates, seconded  as  it  was  by  the  general  increase  of  zeal 
and  morality  at  the  time,  did  its  work ;  and  by  the  close 
of  the  Queen's  reign  the  moral  temper  as  well  as  the  social 
character  of  the  clergy  had  greatly  changed.  Scholars 
like  Hooker  could  now  be  found  in  the  ranks  of  the  priest- 
hood, and  the  grosser  scandals  which  disgraced  the  clergy 
as  a  body  for  the  most  part  disappeared.  It  was  impossi- 
ble for  a  Puritan  libeller  to  bring  against  the  ministers  of 
Elizabeth's  reign  the  charges  of  drunkenness  and  immo- 
rality which  Protestant  libellers  had  been  able  to  bring 
against  the  priesthood  of  Henry's. 

But  the  influence  of  the  new  clergy  was  backed  by  a 
general  revolution  in  English  thought.  The  grammar 
schools  were  diffusing  a  new  knowledge  and  mental  energy 
through  the  middle  classes  and  among  the  country  gentry. 
The  tone  of  the  Universities,  no  unfair  test  of  the  tone  of 
the  nation  at  large,  changed  wholly  as  the  Queen's  reign 
went  on.  At  its  opening  Oxford  was  "a  nest  of  Papists" 
and  sent  its  best  scholars  to  feed  the  Catholic  seminaries. 
At  its  close  the  University  was  a  hot-bed  of  Puritanism, 
where  the  fiercest  tenets  of  Calvin  reigned  supreme.  The 
movement  was  no  doubt  hastened  by  the  political  circum- 
stances of  the  time.  Under  the  rule  of  Elizabeth  loyalty 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  407 

became  more  and  more  a  passion  among  Englishmen;  and 
the  Bull  of  Deposition  placed  Rome  in  the  forefront  of 
Elizabeth's  foes.  The  conspiracies  which  festered  around 
Mary  were  laid  to  the  Pope's  charge ;  he  was  known  to  be 
pressing  on  France  and  on  Spain  the  invasion  and  conquest 
of  the  heretic  kingdom ;  he  was  soon  to  bless  the  Armada. 
Every  day  made  it  harder  for  a  Catholic  to  reconcile 
Catholicism  with  loyalty  to  his  Queen  or  devotion  to  his 
country ;  and  the  mass  of  men,  who  are  moved  by  a  senti- 
ment rather  than  by  reason,  swung  slowly  round  to  the 
side  which,  whatever  its  religious  significance  might  be, 
was  the  side  of  patriotism,  of  liberty  against  tyranny,  of 
England  against  Spain.  A  new  impulse  was  given  to  this 
silent  drift  of  religious  opinion  by  the  atrocities  which 
marked  the  Catholic  triumph  on  the  other  side  of  the 
Channel.  The  horror  of  Alva's  butcheries  or  of  the  mas- 
sacre in  Paris  on  St.  Bartholomew's  day  revived  the  mem- 
ories of  the  bloodshed  under  Mary.  The  tale  of  Protestant 
suffering  was  told  with  a  wonderful  pathos  and  pictur- 
esqueness  by  John  Foxe,  an  exile  during  the  persecution ; 
and  his  "Book  of  Martyrs,"  which  was  set  up  by  royal 
order  in  the  churches  for  public  reading,  passed  from  the 
churches  to  the  shelves  of  every  English  household.  The 
trading  classes  of  the  towns  had  been  the  first  to  embrace 
the  doctrines  of  the  Reformation,  but  their  Protestantism 
became  a  passion  as  the  refugees  of  the  Continent  brought 
to  shop  and  market  their  tale  of  outrage  and  blood. 
Thousands  of  Flemish  exiles  found  a  refuge  in  the  Cinque 
Ports,  a  third  of  the  Antwerp  merchants  were  seen  pacing 
the  new  London  Exchange,  and  a  Church  of  French 
Huguenots  found  a  home  which  it  still  retains  in  the  crypt 
of  Canterbury  Cathedral. 

But  the  decay  of  Catholicism  appealed  strongly  to  the 
new  spirit  of  Catholic  zeal  which,  in  its  despair  of  aid 
from  Catholic  princes,  was  girding  itself  for  its  own  bitter 
struggle  with  heresy.  Pius  the  Fifth  had  now  passed 
away,  but  the  policy  of  the  Papal  court  remained  un- 

9  18  VOL.  2 


408  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boos  VI. 

changed.  His  successor,  Gregory  the  Thirteenth,  showed 
the  same  restless  zeal,  the  same  world-wide  energy  in  the 
work  of  winning  back  the  nations  to  the  Catholic  Church. 
Rome  was  still  the  centre  of  the  Catholic  crusade.  It 
wielded  material  as  well  as  spiritual  arms.  If  the  Papacy 
had  ceased  to  be  a  military  power,  it  remained  a  financial 
power.  Taxes  were  multiplied,  expenses  reduced,  estates 
confiscated,  free  towns  reduced  to  servitude,  with  the  one 
aim  of  enabling  Gregory  and  his  successors  to  build  up  a 
vast  system  of  loans  which  poured  the  wealth  of  Europe 
into  the  treasury  of  Catholicism.  It  was  the  treasure  of 
the  Vatican  which  financed  the  Catholic  movement.  Sub- 
sidies from  the  Papacy  fitted  out  the  fleet  that  faced  the 
Turk  at  Lepanto,  and  gathered  round  the  Guises  their 
lance-knights  from  the  Rhine.  Papal  supplies  equipped 
expeditions  against  Ireland,  and  helped  Philip  to  bear  the 
cost  of  the  Armada.  It  was  the  Papal  exchequer  which 
supported  the  world-wide  diplomacy  that  was  carrying  on 
negotiations  in  Sweden  and  intrigues  in  Poland,  goading 
the  lukewarm  Emperor  to  action  or  quickening  the  sluggish 
movements  of  Spain,  plotting  the  ruin  of  Geneva  or  the 
assassination  of  Orange,  stirring  up  revolt  in  England  and 
civil  war  in  France.  It  was  the  Papacy  that  bore  the  cost 
of  the  religious  propaganda  that  was  fighting  its  stubborn 
battle  with  Calvinist  and  Lutheran  on  the  Rhine  and  the 
Elbe,  or  sending  its  missionaries  to  win  back  the  lost  isle 
of  the  west.  As  early  as  1568  Dr.  Allen,  a  scholar  who 
had  been  driven  from  Oxford  by  the  test  prescribed  in  the 
Act  of  Uniformity,  had  foreseen  the  results  of  the  dying 
out  of  the  Marian  priests,  and  had  set  up  a  seminary  at 
Douay  to  supply  their  place.  The  new  college  was  liber- 
ally supported  by  the  Catholic  peers  and  supplied  with 
pupils  by  a  stream  of  refugees  from  Oxford  and  the  Eng- 
lish grammar  schools.  Three  years  after  its  opening  the 
college  numbered  a  hundred  and  fifty  members.  It  was 
in  these  "  seminary  priests"  that  Gregory  the  Thirteenth 
saw  the  means  of  reviving  Catholic  zeal  in  England,  and 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1608.  409 

at  the  Pope's  bidding  they  began  in  1576  to  pass  over  to 
English  shores. 

Few  as  the  new-comers  were  at  first,  their  presence  was 
at  once  felt  in  the  check  which  it  gave  to  the  gradual  re- 
concilation  of  the  Catholic  gentry  to  the  English  Church. 
No  check  could  have  been  more  galling  to  Elizabeth,  and 
her  resentment  was  quickened  by  the  sense  of  danger. 
Rome  had  set  itself  in  the  forefront  of  her  foes.  She  had 
accepted  the  issue  of  the  Bull  of  Deposition  as  a  declara- 
tion of  war  on  the  part  of  the  Papacy,  and  she  viewed 
the  Douay  priests  with  some  justice  as  its  political  emis- 
saries. The  comparative  security  of  the  Catholics  from 
active  persecution  during  the  early  part  of  her  reign  had 
arisen,  partly  from  the  sympathy  and  connivance  of  the 
gentry  who  acted  as  justices  of  the  peace,  and  still  more 
from  her  own  religious  indifference.  But  the  Test  Act 
placed  the  magistracy  in  Protestant  hands;  and  as  Eliz- 
abeth passed  from  indifference  to  suspicion  and  from  sus- 
picion to  terror  she  put  less  restraint  on  the  bigotry  around 
her.  In  quitting  Eaton  Hall  which  she  had  visited  in  one 
of  her  pilgrimages  the  Queen  gave  its  master,  young  Rook 
wood,  thanks  for  his  entertainment  and  her  hand  to  kisa 
"But  my  Lord  Chamberlain  nobly  and  gravely  under 
standing  that  Rookwood  was  excommunicate"  for  non-at- 
tendance at  church  "  called  him  before  him,  demanded  of 
him  how  he  durst  presume  to  attempt  her  royal  presence,  he 
unfit  to  accompany  any  Christian  person,  forthwith  said 
that  he  was  fitter  for  a  pair  of  stocks,  commanded  him  out 
of  Court,  and  yet  to  attend  the  Council's  pleasure."  The 
Council's  pleasure  was  seen  in  his  committal  to  the  town 
prison  at  Norwich,  while  "  seven  more  gentlemen  of  wor- 
ship" were  fortunate  enough  to  escape  with  a  simple  sen- 
tence of  arrest  at  their  own  homes.  The  Queen's  terror 
became  a  panic  in  the  nation  at  large.  The  few  priests 
who  landed  from  Douay  were  multiplied  into  an  army  of 
Papal  emissaries  dispatched  to  sow  treason  and  revolt 
throughout  the  land.  Parliament,  which  the  working  of 


410  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

the  Test  Act  had  made  a  wholly  Protestant  body,  save  for 
the  presence  of  a  few  Catholics  among  the  peers,  was  sum- 
moned to  meet  the  new  danger,  and  declared  by  formal 
statute  the  landing  of  these  priests  and  the  harboring  of 
them  to  be  treason.  The  Act  proved  no  idle  menace ;  and 
the  execution  of  Cuthbert  Mayne,  a  young  priest  who  was 
arrested  in  Cornwall  with  the  Papal  Bull  of  Deposition 
hidden  about  him,  gave  a  terrible  indication  of  the  char- 
acter of  the  struggle  upon  which  Elizabeth  was  about  to 
enter. 

The  execution  of  Cuthbert  Mayne  was  far  from  being 
purposed  as  the  opening  of  a  religious  persecution.  To 
modern  eyes  there  is  something  even  more  revolting  than 
open  persecution  in  a  policy  which  branded  every  Catholic 
priest  as  a  traitor  and  all  Catholic  worship  as  disloyalty  \ 
but  the  first  step  toward  toleration  was  won  when  the 
Queen  rested  her  system  of  repression  on  purely  political 
grounds.  If  Elizabeth  was  a  persecutor,  she  was  the  first 
English  ruler  who  felt  the  charge  of  religious  persecution 
to  be  a  stigma  on  her  rule.  Nor  can  it  be  denied  that 
there  was  a  real  political  danger  in  the  new  missionaries. 
Allen  was  a  restless  conspirator,  and  the  work  of  his  semi- 
nary priests  was  meant  to  aid  a  new  plan  of  the  Papacy 
for  the  conquest  of  England.  In  1576,  on  the  death  of 
Requesens,  the  Spanish  governor  of  the  Low  Countries,  a 
successor  was  found  for  him  in  Don  John  of  Austria,  a 
natural  brother  of  Philip,  the  victor  of  Lepanto,  and  ihe 
most  famous  general  of  his  day.  The  temper  of  Don  John 
was  daring  and  ambitious ;  his  aim  was  a  crown ;  and  he 
sought  in  the  Netherlands  the  means  of  winning  one.  His 
ambition  lent  itself  easily  to  the  schemes  of  Mary  Stuart 
and  of  Rome ;  and  he  resolved  to  bring  about  by  quick  con- 
cessions a  settlement  in  the  Low  Countries,  to  cross  with 
the  Spanish  forces  employed  there  to  England,  to  raise  the 
Catholics  in  revolt,  to  free  and  marry  Mary  Stuart,  and 
reign  in  her  right  as  an  English  king.  The  plan  was  an 
able  one;  but  it  was  foiled  ere  he  reached  his  post.  The 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1640—1608.  411 

Spanish  troops  had  mutinied  on  the  death  of  Requesens ; 
and  their  sack  of  Antwerp  drew  the  States  of  the  Nether- 
lands together  in  a  "  Pacification  of  Ghent. "  All  differences 
of  religion  were  set  aside  in  a  common  purpose  to  drive 
out  the  stranger.  Baffled  as  he  was,  the  subtlety  of  Don 
John  turned  even  this  league  to  account.  Their  demand 
for  the  withdrawal  of  the  Spanish  troops,  though  fatal  to 
Philip's  interests  in  the  Low  Countries,  could  be  made  to 
serve  the  interests  of  Don  John  across  the  seas.  In  Feb- 
ruary, 1577,  therefore  he  ratified  the  Pacification  of  Ghent, 
consented  to  the  maintenance  of  the  liberties  of  the  States, 
and  engaged  to  withdraw  the  army.  He  stipulated  only 
for  its  withdrawal  by  sea,  and  for  a  delay  of  three  months, 
which  was  needful  for  the  arrangement  of  his  descent  on 
the  English  coast.  Both  demands  however  were  refused ; 
he  was  forced  to  withdraw  his  troops  at  once  and  by  land, 
and  the  scheme  of  the  Papacy  found  itself  utterly  foiled. 

Secret  as  were  the  plans  of  Don  John,  Elizabeth  had 
seen  how  near  danger  had  drawn  to  her.  Fortune  again 
proved  her  friend,  for  the  efforts  of  Don  John  to  bring 
about  a  reconciliation  of  the  Netherlands  proved  fruitless, 
and  negotiations  soon  passed  again  into  the  clash  of  arms. 
But  the  Queen  was  warned  at  last.  On  the  new  outbreak 
of  war  in  1577  she  allied  herself  with  the  States  and  sent 
them  money  and  men.  Such  a  step,  though  not  in  form 
an  act  of  hostility  against  Philip,  for  the  Provinces  with 
which  she  leagued  herself  still  owned  themselves  as  Philip's 
subjects,  was  a  measure  which  proved  the  Queen's  sense 
of  her  need  of  the  Netherlands.  Though  she  had  little 
sympathy  with  their  effort  for  freedom,  she  saw  in  them 
"  the  one  bridle  of  Spain  to  keep  war  out  of  our  own  gate. " 
But  she  was  to  see  the  war  drift  nearer  and  nearer  to  her 
shores.  Now  that  the  Netherlands  were  all  but  lost  Philip's 
slow  stubborn  temper  strung  itself  to  meet  the  greatness  of 
the  peril.  The  Spanish  army  was  reinforced;  and  in 
January,  1578,  it  routed  the  army  of  the  States  on  the 
field  of  Gemblours.  The  sickness  and  death  of  Don  John 


412  HISTORY   OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.       [BouK  VI. 

arrested  its  progress  for  a  few  months;  but  his  successor, 
Philip's  nephew,  Alexander  Farnese,  the  Prince  of  Parma, 
soon  proved  his  greatness  whether  as  a  statesman  or  a  gen- 
eral. He  seized  on  the  difference  of  faith  between  the 
Catholic  and  Protestant  States  as  a  means  of  division. 
The  Pacification  of  Ghent  was  broken  at  the  opening  of 
1579  by  the  secession  of  the  Walloon  provinces  of  the 
southern  border.  It  was  only  by  a  new  league  of  the 
seven  northern  provinces  where  Protestantism  was  domi- 
nant, in  the  Union  of  Utrecht  that  William  of  Orange 
could  meet  Parma's  stroke.  But  the  general  union  of  the 
Low  Countries  was  fatally  broken,  and  from  this  moment 
the  ten  Catholic  states  passed  one  by  one  into  the  hands  of 
Spain. 

The  new  vigor  of  Philip  in  the  West  marked  a  change 
in  the  whole  policy  of  Spain.  Till  now,  in  spite  of  endless 
provocations,  Philip  had  clung  to  the  English  alliance. 
Fear  of  Elizabeth's  union  with  France,  dread  of  her  help 
to  the  Xetherlands,  had  steeled  him  to  bear  patiently  her 
defiance  of  his  counsels,  her  neglect  of  his  threats,  her 
seizure  of  his  treasure,  her  persecution  of  the  Catholic 
party  which  looked  to  him  as  its  head.  But  patience  had 
only  been  met  by  fresh  attacks.  The  attempt  of  Don  John 
had  spurred  Elizabeth  to  ally  herself  to  France.  She  was 
expected  every  hour  to  marry  the  Duke  of  Anjou.  She 
had  given  friendship  and  aid  to  the  revolted  provinces. 
Above  all  her  freebooters  were  carrying  war  into  the  far 
Pacific,  and  challenging  the  right  of  Spain  to  the  'New 
World  of  the  West.  Philip  drifted  whether  he  would  or 
no  into  a  position  of  hostility.  He  had  not  forbidden  the 
projects  of  Don  John;  he  at  last  promised  aid  to  the  pro- 
jects of  Home.  In  1579  the  Papacy  planned  the  greatest 
and  most  comprehensive  of  its  attacks  upon  Elizabeth.  If 
the  Catholic  powers  still  hesitated  and  delayed,  Rome  was 
resolute  to  try  its  own  strength  in  the  West.  The  spiritual 
reconciliation  of  England  was  not  enough.  However  suc- 
cessful the  efforts  of  the  seminary  priests  might  prove  they 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  413 

would  leave  Elizabeth  on  the  throne,  and  the  reign  of 
Elizabeth  was  a  defeat  to  the  Papacy.  In  issuing  its  Bull 
of  Deposition  Rome  had  staked  all  on  the  ruin  of  the  Queen, 
and  even  if  England  became  Catholic  Gregory  could  not 
suffer  his  spiritual  subjects  to  obey  a  ruler  whom  his  sen- 
tence had  declared  an  unlawful  possessor  of  the  throne. 
And  now  that  the  temper  of  Spain  promised  more  vigorous 
action  Rome  could  pave  the  way  for  a  landing  of  Philip's 
troops  by  stirring  up  a  threefold  danger  for  Elizabeth. 
While  fresh  and  more  vigorous  missionaries  egged  on  the 
English  Catholics  to  revolt  the  Pope  hastened  to  bring 
about  a  Catholic  revolution  in  Scotland  and  a  Catholic  in- 
surrection  in  Ireland. 

In  Ireland  Sidney's  victory  had  been  followed  by  ten 
years  of  peace.  Had  the  land  been  left  to  itself  there 
would  have  been  nothing  more  than  the  common  feuds 
and  disturbances  of  the  time.  The  policy  of  driving  its 
people  to  despair  by  seizing  their  lands  for  English  settle- 
ments had  been  abandoned  since  Mary's  day.  The  relig- 
ious question  had  hardly  any  practical  existence.  On  the 
Queen's  accession  indeed  the  ecclesiastical  policy  of  the 
Protestants  had  been  revived  in  name ;  Rome  was  again 
renounced ;  the  Act  of  Uniformity  forced  on  the  island  the 
use  of  the  English  Prayer-book  and  compelled  attendances 
at  the  services  where  it  was  used.  There  was  as  before  a 
general  air  of  compliance  with  the  law.  Even  in  the  dis- 
tricts without  the  Pale  the  bishops  generally  conformed ; 
and  the  only  exceptions  of  which  we  have  any  information 
were  to  be  found  in  the  extreme  south  and  in  the  north, 
where  resistance  was  distant  enough  to  be  safe.  But  the 
real  cause  of  this  apparent  submission  to  the  Act  of  Uni- 
formity lay  in  the  fact  that  it  remained,  and  necessarily 
remained,  a  dead  letter.  It  was  impossible  to  find  any 
considerable  number  of  English  ministers,  or  of  Irish 
priests  acquainted  with  English.  Meath  was  one  of  the 
most  civilized  dioceses  of  the  island,  and  out  of  a  hundred 
curates  in  it  hardly  ten  knew  any  tongue  save  their  own. 


414  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

The  promise  that  the  service-book  should  be  translated 
into  Irish  was  never  carried  out,  and  the  final  clause  of 
the  Act  itself  authorized  the  use  of  a  Latin  rendering  of  it 
till  further  order  could  be  taken.  But  this,  like  its  other 
provisions,  was  ignored ;  and  throughout  Elizabeth's  reign 
the  gentry  of  the  Pale  went  unquestioned  to  Mass.  There 
was  in  fact  no  religious  persecution,  and  in  the  many 
complaints  of  Shane  O'Neill  we  find  no  mention  of  a  re- 
ligious grievance. 

But  this  was  far  from  being  the  view  of  Rome  or  of 
Spain,  of  the  Catholic  missionaries,  or  of  the  Irish  exiles 
abroad.  They  represented  and  perhaps  believed  the  Irish 
people  to  be  writhing  under  a  religious  oppression  which 
it  was  burning  to  shake  off.  They  saw  in  the  Irish  loyalty 
to  Catholicism  a  lever  for  overthrowing  the  heretic  Queen. 
Stukely,  an  Irish  refugee,  had  pressed  on  the  Pope  and 
Spain  as  early  as  1571  the  policy  of  a  descent  on  Ireland; 
and  though  a  force  gathered  in  1578  by  the  Pope  for  this 
purpose  was  diverted  to  a  mad  crusade  against  the  Moors, 
his  plans  were  carried  out  in  1579  by  the  landing  of  a  small 
force  under  the  brother  of  the  Earl  of  Desmond,  James 
Fitzmaurice,  on  the  coast  of  Kerry.  The  Irish  however 
held  aloof,  and  Fitzmaurice  fell  in  a  skirmish;  but  the  re- 
volt of  the  Earl  of  Desmond  gave  fresh  hope  of  success, 
and  the  rising  was  backed  by  the  arrival  in  1580  of  two 
thousand  Papal  soldiers  "in  five  great  ships."  These 
mercenaries  were  headed  by  an  Italian  captain,  San 
Giuseppe,  and  accompanied  by  a  Papal  Legate,  the  Jesuit 
Sanders,  who  brought  plenary  indulgence  for  all  who 
joined  the  sacred  enterprise  and  threats  of  damnation  for 
all  who  resisted  it.  "  What  will  you  answer  to  the  Pope's 
treatment,"  ran  his  letter  to  the  Irish,  "when  he,  bringing 
us  the  Pope's  and  other  Catholic  princes'  aid,  shall  charge 
you  with  the  crime  and  pain  of  heretics  for  maintaining 
an  heretical  pretenced  Queen  against  the  public  sentence 
of  Christ's  vicar?  Can  she  with  her  feigned  supremacy 
absolve  and  acquit  you  from  the  Pope's  excommunication 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1608.  416 

and  curse  ?"  The  news  of  the  landing  of  this  force  stirred 
in  England  a  Protestant  frenzy  that  foiled  the  scheme  for 
a  Catholic  marriage  with  the  Duke  of  Anjou;  while  Eliza- 
beth, panic-stricken,  urged  the  French  King  to  save  her 
from  Philip  by  an  invasion  of  the  Netherlands.  But  the 
danger  passed  quickly  away.  The  Papal  attempt  ended 
in  a  miserable  failure.  The  fort  of  Smenvick,  in  which 
the  invaders  intrenched  themselves,  was  forced  to  sur- 
render, and  its  garrison  put  ruthlessly  to  the  sword.  The 
Earl  of  Desmond,  who  after  long  indecision  rose  to  support 
them,  was  defeated  and  hunted  over  his  own  country, 
which  the  panic-born  cruelty  of  his  pursuers  harried  into 
a  wilderness. 

Pitiless  as  it  was,  the  work  done  in  Minister  spread  a 
terror  over  Ireland  which  served  England  in  good  stead 
when  the  struggle  of  Catholicism  culminated  in  the  fight 
with  the  Armada ;  and  not  a  chieftain  stirred  during  that 
memorable  year  save  to  massacre  the  miserable  men  who 
were  shipwrecked  along  the  coast  of  Bantry  or  Sligo.  But 
the  Irish  revolt  did  much  to  give  fresh  strength  to  the 
panic  which  the  efforts  of  the  seminary  priests  had  roused 
in  England.  This  was  raised  to  frenzy  by  news  that  to 
the  efforts  of  the  seminary  priests  were  now  added  those 
of  Jesuit  missionaries.  Pope  Gregory  had  resolved  to 
support  his  military  effort  in  Ireland  by  a  fresh  missionary 
effort  in  England  itself.  Philip  would  only  promise  to  in- 
vade England  if  the  co-operation  of  its  Catholics  was 
secured ;  and  the  aim  of  the  new  mission  was  to  prepare 
them  for  revolt.  While  the  force  of  San  Giuseppe  was 
being  equipped  for  Kerry  a  young  convert,  William  Gil- 
bert, was  dispatched  to  form  a  Catholic  association  in  Eng- 
land; among  whose  members  the  chief  were  hereafter 
found  engaged  in  conspiracies  for  the  death  of  Elizabeth 
or  sharing  in  the  Gunpowder  Plot.  As  soon  as  this  was 
organized,  as  many  as  fifty  priests,  if  we  may  trust  Allen 
statement,  were  sent  to  land  secretly  on  the  coast.  They 
were  headed  by  two  men  of  remarkable  talents  and  energy. 


416  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

A  large  number  of  the  Oxford  refugees  at  Douay  had 
joined  the  Order  of  Jesus,  whose  members  were  already 
famous  for  their  blind  devotion  to  the  will  and  judgments 
of  Rome ;  and  the  two  ablest  and  most  eloquent  of  these 
exiles,  Campian,  once  a  fellow  of  St.  John's,  and  Parsons, 
once  a  fellow  of  Balliol,  were  dispatched  in  the  spring  of 
1580  as  the  heads  of  a  Jesuit  mission  in  England.  Their 
special  aim  was  to  win  the  nobility  and  gentry  to  the 
Church,  and  for  the  moment  their  success  seemed  over- 
whelming. "It  is  supposed,"  wrote  Allen  triumphantly, 
"  that  there  are  twenty  thousand  more  Catholics  this  year 
than  last."  The  eagerness  shown  to  hear  Campian  was  so 
great  that  in  spite  of  the  rewards  offered  for  his  arrest  by 
the  Government  he  was  able  to  preach  with  hardly  a  show 
of  concealment  to  a  large  audience  at  Smithfield.  From 
London  the  Jesuits  wandered  in  the  disguise  of  captains 
or  serving-men,  sometimes  even  in  the  cassocks  of  the 
English  clergy,  through  many  of  the  counties ;  and  wher- 
ever they  went  the  zeal  of  the  Catholic  gentry  revived. 
The  list  of  nobles  won  back  to  the  older  faith  by  these 
wandering  apostles  was  headed  by  the  name  of  Lord  Ox- 
ford, Cecil's  own  son-in-law,  and  the  proudest  among 
English  peers. 

Their  success  in  undoing  the  Queen's  work  of  compro- 
mise was  shown  in  a  more  public  way  by  the  growing 
withdrawal  of  the  Catholics  from  attendance  at  the  wor- 
ship of  the  English  Church.  It  was  plain  that  a  fierce  re- 
ligious struggle  was  at  hand,  and  men  felt  that  behind  this 
lay  a  yet  fiercer  political  struggle.  Philip's  hosts  were 
looming  over  sea,  and  the  horrors  of  foreign  invasion 
seemed  about  to  be  added  to  the  horrors  of  civil  war.  The 
panic  of  the  Protestants  and  of  the  Parliament  outran  even 
the  real  greatness  of  the  danger.  The  little  group  of  mis- 
sionaries was  magnified  by  popular  fancy  into  a  host  of  dis- 
guised Jesuits ;  and  the  invasion  of  this  imaginary  host  was 
met  by  the  seizure  and  torture  of  as  many  priests  as  the 
government  could  lay  hands  on,  the  imprisonment  of 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  417 

recusants,  the  securing  of  the  prominent  Catholics 
throughout  the  country,  and  by  the  assembling  of  Parlia- 
ment at  the  opening  of  1581.  An  Act  "to  retain  the 
Queen's  Majesty's  subjects  in  due  obedience"  prohibited 
the  saying  of  Mass  even  in  private  houses,  increased  the 
fine  on  recusants  to  twenty  pounds  a  month,  and  enacted 
that  "all  persons  pretending  to  any  power  of  absolving 
subjects  from  their  allegiance,  or  practising  to  withdraw 
them  to  the  Romish  religion,  with  all  persons  after  the 
present  session  willingly  so  absolved  or  reconciled  to  the 
See  of  Rome,  shall  be  guilty  of  High  Treason."  The  way 
in  which  the  vast  powers  conferred  on  the  Crown  by  this 
statute  were  used  by  Elizabeth  was  not  only  characteristic 
in  itself,  but  important  as  at  once  denning  the  policy  to 
which,  in  theory  at  least,  her  successors  adhered  for  more 
than  a  hundred  years.  No  layman  was  brought  to  the  bar 
or  to  the  block  under  its  provisions.  The  oppression  of  the 
Catholic  gentry  was  limited  to  an  exaction,  more  or  less 
rigorous  at  different  times,  of  the  fines  for  recusancy  or 
non-attendance  at  public  worship.  The  work  of  bloodshed 
was  reserved  wholly  for  priests,  and  under  Elizabeth  this 
work  was  done  with  a  ruthless  energy  which  for  the  mo- 
ment crushed  the  Catholic  reaction.  The  Jesuits  were 
tracked  by  pursuivants  and  spies,  dragged  from  their  hid- 
ing-places, and  sent  in  batches  to  the  Tower.  So  hot  was 
the  pursuit  that  Parsons  was  forced  to  fly  across  the  Chan- 
nel; while  Campian  was  arrested  in  July,  1581,  brought  a 
prisoner  through  the  streets  of  London  amid  the  howling 
of  the  mob,  and  placed  at  the  bar  on  the  charge  of  treason. 
"Our  religion  only  is  our  crime,"  was  a  plea  which  galled 
his  judges ;  but  the  political  danger  of  the  Jesuit  preaching 
was  disclosed  in  his  evasion  of  any  direct  reply  when  ques- 
tioned as  to  his  belief  in  the  validity  of  the  excommunica 
tion  or  deposition  of  the  Queen  by  the  Papal  See,  and  after 
much  hesitation  he  was  executed  as  a  traitor. 

Rome  was  now  at  open  war  with  England.     Even  tl 
more  conservative  Englishmen  looked  on  the  Papacy  as  the 


418  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

first  among  England's  foes.  In  striving  to  enforce  the 
claims  of  its  temporal  supremacy,  Rome  had  roused  against 
it  that  national  pride  which  had  battled  with  it  even  in  the 
middle  ages.  From  that  hour  therefore  the  cause  of  Cath- 
olicism was  lost.  England  became  Protestant  in  heart  and 
soul  when  Protestantism  became  identified  with  patriot- 
ism. But  it  was  not  to  Protestantism  only  that  this  atti- 
tude of  Rome  and  the  policy  it  forced  on  the  Government 
gave  a  new  impulse.  The  death  of  Campian  was  the  pre- 
lude to  a  steady,  pitiless  effort  at  the  extermination  of  his 
class.  If  we  adopt  the  Catholic  estimate  of  the  time,  the 
twenty  years  which  followed  saw  the  execution  of  two  hun- 
dred priests,  while  a  yet  greater  number  perished  in  the 
filthy  and  fever-stricken  jails  into  which  they  were 
plunged.  The  work  of  reconciliation  to  Rome  was  ar- 
rested by  this  ruthless  energy ;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
work  which  the  priests  had  effected  could  not  be  undone. 
The  system  of  quiet  compulsion  and  conciliation  to  which 
Elizabeth  had  trusted  for  the  religious  reunion  of  her  sub- 
jects was  foiled ;  and  the  English  Catholics,  fined,  impris- 
oned at  every  crisis  of  national  danger,  and  deprived  of 
their  teachers  by  the  prison  and  the  gibbet,  were  severed 
more  hopelessly  than  evef  from  the  national  Church.  A 
fresh  impulse  was  thus  given  to  the  growing  current  of 
opinion  which  was  to  bring  England  at  last  to  recognize 
the  right  of  every  man  to  freedom  both  of  conscience  and 
of  worship.  "  In  Henry's  days,  the  father  of  this  Eliza- 
beth," wrote  a  Catholic  priest  at  this  time,  "the  whole 
kingdom  with  all  its  bishops  and  learned  men  abjured 
their  faith  at  one  word  of  the  tyrant.  But  now  in  his 
daughter's  days  boys  and  women  boldly  profess  the  faith 
before  the  judge,  and  refuse  to  make  the  slightest  conces 
sion  even  at  the  threat  of  death."  What  Protestantism 
had  first  done  under  Mary,  Catholicism  was  doing  under 
Elizabeth.  It  was  deepening  the  sense  of  personal  religion. 
It  was  revealing  in  men  who  had  till  now  cowered  before 
the  might  of  kingship  a  power  greater  than  the  might  of 


CHAP.  5.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  419 

kings.  It  was  breaking  the  spell  which  the  monarchy 
had  laid  on  the  imagination  of  the  people.  The  Crown 
ceased  to  seem  irresistible  when  "  boys  and  women"  dared 
to  resist  it :  it  lost  its  mysterious  sacredness  when  half  the 
nation  looked  on  their  sovereign  as  a  heretic.  The  "  di- 
vinity that  doth  hedge  a  king"  was  rudely  broken  in  upon 
when  Jesuit  libellers  were  able  to  brand  the  wearer  of  the 
crown  not  only  as  a  usurper  but  as  a  profligate  and  aban- 
doned woman.  The  mighty  impulse  of  patriotism,  of  na- 
tional pride,  which  rallied  the  whole  people  round  Eliz- 
abeth as  the  Armada  threatened  England  or  Drake  threat- 
ened Spain,  shielded  indeed  Elizabeth  from  much  of  the 
natural  results  of  this  drift  of  opinion.  But  with  her  death 
the  new  sentiment  started  suddenly  to  the  front.  The  di- 
vine right  of  kings,  the  divine  right  of  bishops,  found 
themselves  face  to  face  with  a  passion  for  religious  and 
political  liberty  which  had  gained  vigor  from  the  dungeon 
of  the  Catholic  priest  as  from  that  of  the  Protestant  zealot. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

ENGLAND   AND  SPAIN. 
1582—1593. 

THE  work  of  the  Jesuits,  the  withdrawal  of  the  Catho- 
lics from  the  Churches,  the  panic  of  the  Protestants,  were 
signs  that  the  control  of  events  was  passing  from  the 
hands  of  statesmen  and  diplomatists.  The  long  period  of 
suspense  which  Elizabeth's  policy  had  won  was  ending  in 
the  clash  of  national  and  political  passions.  The  rising 
fanaticism  of  the  Catholic  world  was  breaking  down  the 
caution  and  hesitation  of  Philip ;  while  England  was  set- 
ting aside  the  balanced  neutrality  of  her  Queen  and  push- 
ing boldly  forward  to  a  contest  which  it  felt  to  be  inevi- 
table. The  public  opinion,  to  which  Elizabeth  was  so  sen- 
sitive, took  every  day  a  bolder  and  more  decided  tone. 
Her  cold  indifference  to  the  heroic  struggle  in  Flanders 
was  more  than  compensated  by  the  enthusiasm  it  roused 
among  the  nation  at  large.  The  earlier  Flemish  refugees 
found  a  home  in  the  Cinque  Ports.  The  exiled  merchants 
of  Antwerp  were  welcomed  by  the  merchants  of  London. 
While  Elizabeth  dribbled  out  her  secret  aid  to  the  Prince 
of  Orange,  the  London  traders  sent  him  half-a-million 
from  their  own  purses,  a  sum  equal  to  a  year's  revenue  of 
fthe  Crown.  Volunteers  stole  across  the  Channel  in  in- 
creasing numbers  to  the  aid  of  the  Dutch,  till  the  five 
hundred  Englishmen  who  fought  in  the  beginning  of  the 
struggle  rose  to  a  brigade1  of  five  thousand,  whose  bravery 
turned  one  of  the  most  critical  battles  of  the  war.  Dutch 
privateers  found  shelter  in  English  ports,  and  English 
vessels  hoisted  the  flag  of  the  States  for  a  dash  at  the 
Spanish  traders.  Protestant  fervor  rose  steadily  among 


.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  421 

Englishmen  as  "  the  best  captains  and  soldiers"  returned 
from  the  campaigns  in  the  Low  Countries  to  tell  of  Alva's 
atrocities,  or  as  privateers  brought  back  tales  of  English 
seamen  who  had  been  seized  in  Spain  and  the  New  World, 
to  linger  amid  the  tortures  of  the  Inquisition,  or  to  die 
in  its  fires.  In  the  presence  of  this  steady  drift  of  popular 
passion  the  diplomacy  of  Elizabeth  became  of  little  mo- 
ment. If  the  Queen  was  resolute  for  peace,  England  was 
resolute  for  war.  A  new  daring  had  arisen  since  the  be- 
ginning of  her  reign,  when  Cecil  and  Elizabeth  stood  alone 
in  their  belief  in  England's  strength,  and  when  the  diplo- 
matists of  Europe  regarded  her  obstinate  defiance  of 
Philip's  counsels  as  "  madness. "  The  whole  English  people 
had  caught  the  self-confidence  and  daring  of  their  Queen. 
It  was  the  instinct  of  liberty  as  well  as  of  Protestantism 
that  drove  England  forward  to  a  conflict  with  Philip  of 
Spain.  Spain  was  at  this  moment  the  mightiest  of  Euro- 
pean powers.  The  discoveries  of  Columbus  had  given  it 
the  New  World  of  the  West ;  the  conquests  of  Cortes  and 
Pizarro  poured  into  its  treasury  the  plunder  of  Mexico  and 
Peru ;  its  galleons  brought  the  rich  produce  of  the  Indies, 
their  gold,  their  jewels,  their  ingots  of  silver,  to  the  harbor 
of  Cadiz.  To  the  New  World  the  Spanish  King  added  the 
fairest  and  wealthiest  portions  of  the  Old ;  he  was  master 
of  Naples  and  Milan,  the  richest  and  most  fertile  districts 
of  Italy;  in  spite  of  revolt  he  was  still  lord  of  the  busy 
provinces  of  the  Low  Countries,  of  Flanders,  the  great 
manufacturing  district  of  the  time,  and  of  Antwerp,  which 
had  become  the  central  mart  for  the  commerce  of  the  world. 
His  native  kingdom,  poor  as  it  was,  supplied  him  with  the 
Steadiest  and  the  most  daring  soldiers  that  Europe  had 
seen  since  the  fall  of  the  Eoman  Empire.  The  renown  of 
the  Spanish  infantry  had  been  growing  from  the  day  when 
it  flung  off  the  onset  of  the  French  chivalry  on  the  fi 
Kavenna;  and  the  Spanish  generals  stood  without  nvali 
in  their  military  skill,  as  they  stood  without  rivals  in  then 
ruthless  cruelty. 


422  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boos:  VL 

The  whole  too  of  this  enormous  power  was  massed  in 
the  hands  of  a  single  man.  Served  as  he  was  by  able 
statesmen  and  subtle  diplomatists,  Philip  of  Spain  was  his 
own  sole  minister;  laboring  day  after  day,  like  a  clerk, 
through  the  long  years  of  his  reign,  amid  the  papers 
whicb  crowded  his  closet ;  but  resolute  to  let  nothing  pass 
without  his  supervision,  and  to  suffer  nothing  to  be  done 
save  by  his  express  command.  His  scheme  of  rule  dif- 
fered widely  from  that  of  his  father.  Charles  had  held 
the  vast  mass  of  his  dominions  by  a  purely  personal  bond. 
He  chose  no  capital,  but  moved  ceaselessly  from  land  to 
land;  he  was  a  German  in  the  Empire,  a  Spaniard  in 
Castile,  a  Netherlander  in  the  Netherlands.  But  in  the 
hands  of  Philip  his  father's  heritage  became  a  Spanish 
realm.  His  capital  was  fixed  at  Madrid.  The  rest  of  his 
dominions  sank  into  provinces  of  Spain,  to  be  governed  by 
Spanish  viceroys,  and  subordinated  to  the  policy  and  in- 
terests of  a  Spanish  minister.  All  local  liberties,  all 
varieties  of  administration,  all  national'  differences  were 
set  aside  for  a  monotonous  despotism  which  was  wielded 
by  Philip  himself.  It  was  his  boast  that  everywhere  in 
the  vast  compass  of  his  dominions  he  was  "  an  absolute 
king."  It  was  to  realize  this  idea  of  unshackled  power 
that  he  crushed  the  liberties  of  Aragon,  as  his  father  had 
crushed  the  liberties  of  Castile,  and  sent  Alva  to  tread 
under  foot  the  constitutional  freedom  of  the  Low  Coun- 
tries. His  bigotry  went  hand  in  hand  with  his  thirst  for 
rule.  Catholicism  was  the  one  common  bond  that  knit  his 
realms  together,  and  policy  as  well  as  religious  faith  made 
Philip  the  champion  of  Catholicism.  Italy  and  Spain  lay 
hushed  beneath  the  terror  of  the  Inquisition  while  Flan- 
ders was  being  purged  of  heresy  by  the  stake  and  the  sword. 

The  shadow  of  this  gigantic  power  fell  like  a  deadly 
blight  over  Europe.  The  new  Protestantism,  like  the  new 
spirit  of  political  liberty,  saw  its  real  foe  in  Philip.  It 
was  Spain,  rather  than  the  Guises,  against  wnich  Coligni 
and  the  Huguenots  struggled  in  vain ;  it  was  Spain  with 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1608.  423 

which  William  of  Orange  was  wrestling  for  religious  and 
civil  freedom;  it  was  Spain  which  was  soon  to  plunge 
Germany  into  the  chaos  of  the  Thirty  Years'  War,  and  to 
which  the  Catholic  world  had  for  twenty  years  been  look- 
ing, and  looking  in  vain,  for  a  victory  over  heresy  in  Eng- 
land. Vast  in  fact  as  Philip's  resources  were,  they  were 
drained  by  the  yet  vaster  schemes  of  ambition  into  which 
his  religion  and  his  greed  of  power,  as  well  as  the  wide 
distribution  of  his  dominions,  perpetually  drew  him.  To 
coerce  the  weaker  States  of  Italy,  to  command  the  Medi- 
terranean, to  keep  a  hold  on  the  African  coast,  to  preserve 
his  influence  in  Germany,  to  support  Catholicism  in 
France,  to  crush  heresy  in  Flanders,  to  dispatch  one 
Armada  against  the  Turk  and  another  against  England, 
were  aims  mighty  enough  to  exhaust  even  the  power  of 
the  Spanish  monarchy.  But  it  was  rather  on  tLe  char- 
acter of  Philip  than  on  the  exhaustion  of  his  treasury  that 
Elizabeth  counted  for  success  in  the  struggle  which  had 
so  long  been  going  on  between  them.  The  King's  temper 
was  slow,  cautious  even  to  timidity,  losing  itself  continu- 
ally in  delays,  in  hesitations,  in  anticipating  remote  perils, 
in  waiting  for  distant  chances ;  and  on  the  slowness  and 
hesitation  of  his  temper  his  rival  had  been  playing  ever 
since  she  mounted  the  throne.  The  agility,  the  sudden 
changes  of  Elizabeth,  her  lies,  her  mystifications,  though 
they  failed  to  deceive  Philip,  puzzled  and  impeded  his 
mind.  The  diplomatic  contest  between  the  two  was  like 
the  fight  which  England  was  soon  to  see  between  the 
ponderous  Spanish  galleon  and  the  light  pinnace  of  the 
buccaneers. 

But  amid  all  the  cloud  of  intrigue  which  disguised 
their  policy,  the  actual  course  of  their  relations  had  been 
clear  and  simple.  In  the  earlier  years  of  Elizabeth  Philip 
had  been  driven  to  her  alliance  by  his  fear  of  France  and 
his  dread  of  the  establishment  of  a  French  supremacy  over 
England  and  Scotland  through  the  accession  of  Mary 
Stuart.  As  time  went  on,  the  discontent  and  rising  of  the 


424  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boos  VI. 

Netherlands  made  it  of  hardly  less  import  to  avoid  a  strife 
with  the  Queen.  Had  revolt  in  England  prospered,  or 
Mary  Stuart  succeeded  in  her  countless  plots,  or  Elizabeth 
fallen  beneath  an  assassin's  knife,  Philip  was  ready  to 
have  struck  in  and  reaped  the  fruits  of  other  men's  labors. 
But  his  stake  was  too  vast  to  risk  an  attack  while  the 
Queen  sat  firmly  «on  her  throne ;  and  the  cry  of  the  Eng- 
lish Catholics,  or  the  pressure  of  the  Pope,  failed  to  drive 
the  Spanish  King  into  strife  with  Elizabeth.  But  as  the 
tide  of  religious  passion  which  had  so  long  been  held  in 
check  broke  over  its  banks  the  political  face  of  Europe 
changed.  Philip  had  less  to  dread  from  France  or  from  an 
English  alliance  with  France.  The  abstinence  of  Eliza- 
beth from  intervention  in  the  Netherlands  was  neutralized 
by  the  intervention  of  the  English  people.  Above  all,  the 
English  hostility  threatened  Philip  in  a  quarter  where  he 
was  more  sensitive  than  elsewhere,  his  dominion  in  the 
West. 

Foiled  as  the  ambition  of  Charles  the  Fifth  had  been  in 
the  Old  World,  his  empire  had  widened  with  every  year 
in  the  New.  At  his  accession  to  the  throne  the  Spanish 
rule  had  hardly  spread  beyond  the  Island  of  St.  Domingo, 
which  Columbus  had  discovered  twenty  years  before.  But 
greed  and  enterprise  drew  Cortes  to  the  mainland,  and  in 
1521  his  conquest  of  Mexico  added  a  realm  of  gold  to  the 
dominions  of  the  Empire.  Ten  years  later  the  great  empire 
of  Peru  yielded  to  the  arms  of  Pizarro.  With  the  conquest 
of  Chili  the  whole  western  coast  of  South  America  passed 
into  the  hands  of  Spain ;  and  successive  expeditions  planted 
the  Spanish  flag  at  point  upon  point  along  the  coast  of  the 
Atlantic  from  Florida  to  the  river  Plate.  A  Papal  grant 
had  conveyed  the  whole  of  America  to  the  Spanish  crown, 
and  fortune  seemed  for  long  years  to  ratify  the  judgment 
of  the  Vatican.  No  European  nation  save  Portugal  dis- 
puted the  possession  of  the  New  World,  and  Portugal  was 
too  busy  with  its  discoveries  in  Africa  and  India  to  claim 
more  than  the  territory  of  Brazil.  Though  Francis  the 


CHAP. «.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540-1603.  425 

First  sent  seamen  to  explore  the  American  coast,  his  am- 
bition  found  other  work  at  home;  and  a  Huguenot  colony 
which  settled  in  Florida  was  cut  to  pieces  by  the  Spaniards. 
Only  in  the  far  north  did  a  few  French  settlers  find  rest 
beside  the  waters  of  the  St.  Lawrence.  England  had 
reached  the  mainland  even  earlier  than  Spain,  for  before 
Columbus  touched  its  shores  Sebastian  Cabot,  a  seaman  of 
Genoese  blood  but  born  and  bred  in  England,  sailed  with 
an  English  crew  from  Bristol  in  1497,  and  pushed  along 
the  coast  of  America  to  the  south  as  far  as  Florida,  and 
northward  as  high  as  Hudson's  Bay.  But  no  Englishman 
f ollowed  on  the  track  of  this  bold  adventurer ;  and  while 
Spain  built  up  her  empire  in  the  New  World,  the  English 
seamen  reaped  a  humbler  harvest  in  the  fisheries  of  New- 
foundland. 

There  was  little  therefore  in  the  circumstances  which 
attended  the  first  discovery  of  the  western  continent  that 
promised  well  for  freedom.  Its  one  result  as  yet  was  to 
give  an  enormous  impulse  to  the  most  bigoted  and  tyran- 
nical among  the  powers  of  Europe,  and  to  pour  the  gold  of 
Mexico  and  Peru  into  the  treasury  of  Spain.  But  as  the 
reign  of  Elizabeth  went  on  the  thoughts  of  Englishmen 
turned  again  to  the  New  World.  A  happy  instinct  drew 
them  from  the  first  not  to  the  southern  shores  that  Spain 
was  conquering,  but  to  the  ruder  and  more  barren  districts 
of  the  north.  In  1576  the  dream  of  finding  a  passage  to 
Asia  by  a  voyage  round  the  northern  coast  of  the  Ameri- 
can continent  drew  a  west-country  seaman,  Martin  Fro- 
bisher,  to  the  coast  of  Labrador ;  and,  foiled  as  he  was  in 
his  quest,  the  news  he  brought  back  of  the  existence  of 
gold  mines  there  set  adventurers  cruising  among  the  ice- 
bergs of  Baffin's  Bay.  Elizabeth  herself  joined  in  the 
venture ;  but  the  settlement  proved  a  failure,  the  ore  which 
the  ships  brought  back  turned  out  to  be  worthless,  and 
England  was  saved  from  that  greed  of  gold  which  was  to 
be  fatal  to  the  energies  of  Spain.  But  failure  as  it  was, 
Frobisher's  venture  had  shown  the  readiness  of  English- 


426  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

men  to  defy  the  claims  of  Spain  to  the  exclusive  possession 
of  America  or  the  American  seas.  They  were  already  de- 
fying these  claims  in  a  yet  more  galling  way.  The  sea- 
men of  the  southern  and  southwestern  coasts  had  long 
been  carrying  on  a  half -piratical  war  on  their  own  account. 
Four  years  after  Elizabeth's  accession  the  Channel  swarmed 
with  "sea-dogs,"  as  they  were  called,  who  sailed  under 
letters  of  marque  from  Conde  and  the  Huguenot  leaders, 
and  took  heed  neither  of  the  complaints  of  the  French 
Court  nor  of  their  own  Queen's  efforts  at  repression.  Her 
efforts  broke  against  the  connivance  of  every  man  along  the 
coast,  of  the  very  port  officers  of  the  Crown,  who  made 
profit  out  of  the  spoil  which  the  plunderers  brought  home, 
and  of  the  gentry  of  the  west,  whose  love  of  venture  made 
them  go  hand  in  hand  with  the  sea-dogs.  They  broke 
above  all  against  the  national  craving  for  open  fight  with 
Spain,  and  the  Protestant  craving  for  open  fight  with 
Catholicism.  If  the  Queea  held  back  from  any  formal 
part  in  the  great  war  of  religions  across  the  Channel,  her 
subjects  were  keen  to  take  their  part  in  it.  Young  Eng- 
lishmen crossed  the  sea  to  serve  under  Conde  or  Henry  of 
Navarre.  The  war  in  the  Netherlands  drew  hundreds  of 
Protestants  to  the  field.  Their  passionate  longing  for  a 
religious  war  found  a  wider  sphere  on  the  sea.  When 
the  suspension  of  the  French  contest  forced  the  sea-dogs  to 
haul  down  the  Huguenot  flag,  they  joined  in  the  cruises 
of  the  Dutch  "  sea-beggars."  From  plundering  the  vessels 
of  Havre  and  Rochelle  they  turned  to  plunder  the  galleons 
of  Spain. 

Their  outrages  tried  Philip's  patience ;  but  his  slow  re- 
sentment only  quickened  into  angry  alarm  when  the  sea- 
dogs  sailed  westward  to  seek  a  richer  spoil.  The  Papal 
decree  which  gave  the  New  World  to  Spain,  the  threats 
of  the  Spanish  King  against  any  Protestant  who  should 
visit  its  seas,  fell  idly  on  the  ears  of  English  seamen. 
Philip's  care  to  save  his  new  dominions  from  the  touch  of 
heresy  was  only  equalled  by  his  resolve  to  suffer  no  trade 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540-1603.  427 

between  them  and  other  lands  than  Spain.  But  the  sea 
dogs  were  as  ready  to  traffic  as  to  fight  It  was  in  vain 
that  their  vessels  were  seized,  and  the  sailors  flung  into 
the  dungeons  of  the  Inquisition,  "laden  with  irons,  with- 
out sight  of  sun  or  moon."  The  profits  of  the  trade  were 
large  enough  to  counteract  its  perils;  and  the  bigotry  of 
Philip  was  met  by  a  bigotry  as  merciless  as  his  own.  The 
Puritanism  of  the  sea-dogs  went  hand  in  hand  with  their 
love  of  adventure.  To  break  through  the  Catholic  mo- 
nopoly of  the  New  World,  to  kill  Spaniards,  to  sell  negroes, 
to  sack  gold-ships,  were  in  these  men's  mind  a  seemly  work 
for  "the  elect  of  God."  The  name  of  Francis  Drake  be- 
came the  terror  of  the  Spanish  Indies.  In  Drake  a  Prot- 
estant fanaticism  went  hand  in  hand  with  a  splendid  dar- 
ing. He  conceived  the  design  of  penetrating  into  the 
Pacific,  whose  waters  had  till  then  never  seen  an  English 
flag ;  and  backed  by  a  little  company  of  adventurers,  he  set 
sail  in  1577  for  the  southern  seas  in  a  vessel  hardly  as  big 
as  a  Channel  schooner,  with  a  few  yet  smaller  companions, 
who  fell  away  before  the  storms  and  perils  of  the  voyage. 
But  Drake,  with  his  one  ship  and  eighty  men,  held  boldly 
on ;  and,  passing  the  Straits  of  Magellan,  untraversed  as 
yet  by  any  Englishman,  swept  the  unguarded  coast  of 
Chili  and  Peru,  loaded  his  bark  with  the  gold  dust  and 
silver  ingots  of  Potosi,  as  well  as  with  the  pearls,  emeralds, 
and  diamonds  which  formed  the  cargo  of  the  great  galleon 
that  sailed  once  a  year  from  Lima  to  Cadiz.  With  spoils 
of  above  half-a-million  in  value  the  daring  adventurer 
steered  undauntedly  for  the  Moluccas,  rounded  the  Cape 
of  Good  Hope,  and,  in  1580,  after  completing  the  circuit  of 
the  globe,  dropped  anchor  again  in  Plymouth  harbor. 

The  romantic  daring  of  Drake's  voyage  as  well  as  the 
vastness  of  his  spoil  roused  a  general  enthusiasm  through- 
out England.  But  the  welcome  which  he  received  from 
Elizabeth  on  his  return  was  accepted  by  Philip  as  an  out- 
rage which  could  only  be  expiated  by  war.  Sluggish  as 
it  was,  the  blood  of  the  Spanish  King  was  fired  at  last  by 


428  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI 

the.  defiance  with  which  the  Queen  listened  to  all  demands 
for  redress.  She  met  a  request  for  Drake's  surrender  by 
knighting  the  freebooter  and  by  wearing  in  her  crown  the 
jewels  he  offered  her  as  a  present.  When  the  Spanish 
ambassador  threatened  that  "  matters  would  come  to  the 
cannon,"  she  replied  "quietly,  in  her  most  natural  voice, 
as  if  she  were  telling  a  common  story,"  wrote  Mendoza, 
"that"  if 'I  used  threats  of  that  kind  she  would  fling  me 
into  a  dungeon."  Outraged  indeed  as  Philip  was,  she  be- 
lieved that  with  the. Netherlands  still  in  revolt  and  France 
longing  for -her  alliance  to  enable  it  to  seize  them,  the  King 
could  not,  afford  to  quarrel  with  her.  But  the  victories 
and  diplomacy  of  Parma  were  already  reassuring  Philip 
in  the  Netherlands ;  while  the  alliance  of  Elizabeth  with 
the  revolted  Provinces  convinced  him  at  last  that  their  re- 
duction could  best  be  brought  about  by  an  invasion  of 
England  and  the  establishment  of  Mary  Stuart  on  its 
throne.  With  this  conviction  he  lent  himself  to  the  plans 
of  Rome,  and  waited  only  for  the  rising  in  Ireland  and 
the  revolt  of  the  English  Catholics  which  Pope  Gregory 
promised  him  to  dispatch  forces  from  both  Flanders  and 
Spain.  But  the  Irish  rising  was  over  before  Philip  could 
act;  and  before  the  Jesuits  could  rouse  England  to  rebel- 
lion the  Spanish  King  himself  was  drawn  to  a  new  scheme 
of  ambition  by  the  death  of  King  Sebastian  of  Portugal  in 
1580.  Philip  claimed  the  Portuguese  crown;  and  in  less 
than  two  months  Alva  laid  the  kingdom  at  his  feet.  The 
conquest  of  Portugal  was  fatal  to  the  Papal  projects  against 
England,  for  while  the  armies  of  Spain  marched  on  Lisbon 
Elizabeth  was  able  to  throw  the  leaders  of  the  future  re- 
volt into  prison  and  to  send  Campian  to  the  scaffold.  On 
the  other  hand  it  raised  Philip  into  a  far  more  formidable 
foe.  The  conquest  almost  doubled  his  power.  His  gain 
was  far  more  than  that  of  Portugal  itself.  While  Spain 
had  been  winning  the  New  World  her  sister-kingdom  had 
been  winning  a  wide  though  scattered  dominion  on  the 
African  coast,  the  coast  of  India,  and  the  islands  of  the 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  429 

Pacific.  Less  in  extent,  the  Portuguese  settlements  were 
at  the  moment  of  even  greater  value  to  the  mother  country 
than  the  colonies  of  Spain.  The  gold  of  Guinea,  the  silks 
of  Goa,  the  spices  of  the  Philippines  made  Lisbon  one  of 
the  marts  of  Europe.  The  sword  of  Alva  had  given  Philip 
a  hold  on  the  richest  trade  of  the  world.  It  had  given  him 
the  one  navy  that  as  yet  rivalled  his  own.  His  flag  claimed 
mastery  in  the  Indian  and  the  Pacific  seas,  as  it  claimed 
mastery  in  the  Atlantic  and  Mediterranean. 

The  conquest  of  Portugal  therefore  wholly  changed 
Philip's  position.  It  not  only  doubled  his  power  and  re- 
sources, but  it  did  this  at  a  time  when  fortune  seemed 
everywhere  wavering  to  his  side.  The  provinces  of  the 
Netherlands,  which  still  maintained  a  struggle  for  their 
liberties,  drew  courage  from  despair;  and  met  Philip's 
fresh  hopes  of  their  subjection  by  a  solemn  repudiation  of 
his  sovereignty  in  the  summer  of  1581.  But  they  did  not 
dream  that  they  could  stand  alone,  and  they  sought  the 
aid  of  France  by  choosing  as  their  sovereign  the  Duke  of 
Alengon,  who  on  his  brother  Henry's  accession  to  the 
throne  had  become  Duke  of  Anjou.  The  choice  was  only 
part  of  a  political  scheme  which  was  to  bind  the  whole  of 
Western  Europe  together  against  Spain.  The  conquest  of 
Portugal  had  at  once  drawn  France  and  England  into  close 
relations,  and  Catharine  of  Medicis  strove  to  league  the 
two  countries  by  a  marriage  of  Elizabeth  with  the  Duke 
of  Anjou.  Such  a  match  would  have  been  a  purely  polit- 
ical one,  for  Elizabeth  was  now  forty-eight,  and  Francis 
of  Anjou  had  no  qualities  either  of  mind  or  body  to  recom- 
mend him  to  the  Queen.  But  the  English  ministers  pressed 
for  it,  Elizabeth  amid  all  her  coquetries  seemed  at  last  ready 
to  marry,  and  the  States  seized  the  moment  to  lend  them- 
selves to  the  alliance  of  the  two  powers  by  choosing  the 
Duke  as  their  lord.  Anjou  accepted  their  offer,  and  cross- 
ing to  the  Netherlands,  drove  Parma  from  Cambray ;  then 
sailing  again  to  England,  he  spent  the  winter  in  a  fresh 
wooing. 


430  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

But  the  Duke's  wooing  still  proved  fruitless.  The 
schemes  of  diplomacy  found  themselves  shattered  against 
the  religious  enthusiasm  of  the  time.  While  Orange  and 
Catharine  and  Elizabeth  saw  only  the  political  weight  of 
the  marriage  as  a  check  upon  Philip,  the  sterner  Protes- 
tants in  England  saw  in  it  a  victory  for  Catholicism  at 
home.  Of  the  difference  between  the  bigoted  Catholicism 
of  Spain  and  the  more  tolerant  Catholicism  of  the  court  of 
France  such  men  recked  nothing.  The  memory  of  St. 
Bartholomew's  day  hung  around  Catharine  of  Medicis; 
and  the  success  of  the  Jesuits  at  this  moment  roused  the 
dread  of  a  general  conspiracy  against  Protestantism.  A 
Puritan  lawyer  named  Stubbs  only  expressed  the  alarm  of 
his  fellows  in  his  "  Discovery  of  a  Gaping  Gulf"  in  which 
.  England  was  to  plunge  through  the  match  with  Anjou. 
When  the  hand  of  the  pamphleteer  was  cut  off  as  a  penalty 
for  his  daring,  Stubbs  waved  his  hat  with  the  hand  that 
was  left,  and  cried  "  God  save  Queen  Elizabeth."  But  the 
Queen  knew  how  stern  a  fanaticism  went  with  his  un- 
flinching loyalty,  and  her  dread  of  a  religious  conflict 
within  her  realm  must  have  quickened  the  fears  which  the 
worthless  temper  of  her  wooer  cannot  but  have  inspired. 
She  gave  however  no  formal  refusal  of  her  hand.  So  long 
as  coquetry  sufficed  to  hold  France  and  England  together, 
she  was  ready  to  play  the  coquette;  and  it  was  as  the 
future  husband  of  the  Queen  that  Anjou  again  appeared  in 

1582  in  the  Netherlands  and  received  the  formal  submis- 
sion of  the  revolted  States,  save  Holland  and  Zealand. 
But  the  subtle  schemes  which  centred  in  him  broke  down 
before  the  selfish  perfidy  of  the  Duke.     Resolved  to  be 
ruler  in  more  than  name,  he  planned  the  seizure  of  the 
greater  cities  of  the  Netherlands,  and  at  the  opening  of 

1583  made  a  fruitless  effort  to  take  Antwerp  by  surprise. 
It  was  in  vain  that  Orange  strove  by  patient  negotiation 
to  break  the  blow.     The  Duke  fled  homeward,  the  match 
and  sovereignty  were  at  an  end,  the  alliance  of  the  three 
powers  vanished  like  a  dream.     The  last  Catholic  provinces 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1608.  431 

passed  over  to  Parma's  side;  the  weakened  Netherlands 
found  themselves  parted  from  France;  and  at  the  close  of 
1583  Elizabeth  saw  herself  left  face  to  face  with  Philip  of 
•  Spain. 

Nor  was  this  all.  At  home  as  well  as  abroad  troubles 
were  thickening  around  the  Queen.  The  fanaticism  of  the 
Catholic  world  without  was  stirring  a  Protestant  fanati- 
cism within  the  realm.  As  Rome  became  more  and  more 
the  centre  of  hostility  to  England,  patriotism  itself  stirred 
men  to  a  hatred  of  Rome ;  and  their  hatred  of  Rome  passed 
easily  into  a  love  for  the  fiercer  and  sterner  Calvinism 
which  looked  on  all  compromise  with  Rome,  or  all  accept- 
ance of  religious  traditions  or  usages  which  had  been  as- 
sociated with  Rome,  as  treason  against  God.  Puritanism, 
as  this  religious  temper  was  called,  was  becoming  the  creed 
of  every  earnest  Protestant  throughout  the  realm ;  and  the 
demand  for  a  further  advance  toward  the  Calvinistic 
system  and  a  more  open  breach  with  Catholicism  which 
was  embodied  in  the  suppression  of  the  "superstitious 
usages"  became  stronger  than  ever.  But  Elizabeth  was 
firm  as  of  old  to  make  no  advance.  Greatly  as  the  Prot- 
estants had  grown,  she  knew  they  were  still  a  minority  in 
the  realm.  If  the  hotter  Catholics  were  fast  decreasing, 
they  remained  a  large  and  important  body.  But  the  mass 
of  the  nation  was  neither  Catholic  nor  Protestant.  It  had 
lost  faith  in  the  Papacy.  It  was  slowly  drifting  to  a  new 
faith  in  the  Bible.  But  it  still  clung  obstinately  to  the 
past ;  it  still  recoiled  from  violent  change ;  its  temper  was 
religious  rather  than  theological,  and  it  shrank  from  the 
fanaticism  of  Geneva  as  it  shrank  from  the  fanaticism  of 
Rome.  It  was  a  proof  of  Elizabeth's  genius  that  alone 
among  her  counsellors  she  understood  this  drift  of  opinion, 
and  withstood  measures  which  would  have  startled  the 
mass  of  Englishmen  into  a  new  resistance. 

But  her  policy  was  wider  than  her  acts.  The  growing 
Puritanism  of  the  clergy  stirred  her  wrath  above  measure, 
and  she  met  the  growth  of  "  nonconf onning"  ministers  by 


432  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

conferring  new  powers  in  1583  on  the  Ecclesiastical  Com- 
mission. From  being  a  temporary  board  which  repre- 
sented the  Royal  Supremacy  in  matters  ecclesiastical,  the 
Commission  was  now  turned  into  a  permanent  body  wield- 
ing the  almost  unlimited  powers  of  the  Crown.  All  opin- 
ions or  acts  contrary  to  the  Statutes  of  Supremacy  and 
Uniformity  fell  within  its  cognizance.  A  right  of  de- 
privation placed  the  clergy  at  its  mercy.  It  had  power  to 
alter  or  amend  the  statutes  of  colleges  or  schools.  Not 
only  heresy  and  schisms  and  nonconformity,  but  incest  or 
aggravated  adultery  were  held  to  fall  within  its  scope ;  its 
means  of  inquiry  were  left  without  limit,  and  it  might  fine 
or  imprison  at  its  will.  By  the  mere  establishment  of  such 
a  court  half  the  work  of  the  Reformation  was  undone. 
The  large  number  of  civilians  on  the  board  indeed  seemed 
to  furnish  some  security  against  the  excess  of  ecclesiastical 
tyranny.  Of  its  forty-four  commissioners  however  few 
actually  took  any  part  in  its  proceedings ;  and  the  powers 
of  the  Commission  were  practically  left  in  the  hands  of 
the  successive  Primates.  No  Archbishop  of  Canterbury 
since  the  days  of  Augustine  had  wielded  an  authority  so 
vast,  so  utterly  despotic,  as  that  of  Whitgift  and  Bancroft 
and  Abbot  and  Laud.  The  most  terrible  feature  of  their 
spiritual  tyranny  was  its  wholly  personal  character.  The 
old  symbols  of  doctrine  were  gone,  and  the  lawyers  had 
not  yet  stepped  in  to  protect  the  clergy  by  defining  the  ex- 
act limits  of  the  new.  The  result  was  that  at  the  commis- 
sion-board at  Lambeth  the  Primates  created  their  own 
tests  of  doctrine  with  an  utter  indifference  to  those  created 
by  law.  In  one  instance  Parker  deprived  a  vicar  of  his 
benefice  for  a  denial  of  the  verbal  inspiration  of  the  Bible. 
Nor  did  the  successive  Archbishops  care  greatly  if  the  test 
was  a  varying  or  a  conflicting  one.  Whitgift  strove  to 
force  on  the  Church  the  Calvinistic  supralapsarianism  of 
his  Lambeth  Articles.  Bancroft,  who  followed  him,  was 
as  earnest  in  enforcing  his  anti-Calvinistic  dogma  of  the 
divine  right  of  the  episcopate.  Abbot  had  no  mercy  for 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540-1603.  433 

Erastians.  Laud  had  none  for  anti-Erastians.  It  is  no 
wonder  that  the  Ecclesiastical  Commission,  which  these 
men  represented,  soon  stank  in  the  nostrils  of  the  English 
clergy.  Its  establishment  however  marked  the  adoption 
of  a  more  resolute  policy  on  the  part  of  the  Crown,  and  its 
efforts  were  backed  by  stern  measures  of  repression.  All 
preaching  or  reading  in  private  houses  was  forbidden ;  and 
in  spite  of  the  refusal  of  Parliament  to  enforce  the  require- 
ment of  them  by  law,  subscription  to  the  Three  Articles 
was  exacted  from  every  member  of  the  clergy.  For  the 
moment  these  measures  were  crowned  with  success.  The 
movement  which  Cartwright  still  headed  was  checked; 
Cartwright  himself  was  driven  from  his  Professorship; 
and  an  outer  uniformity  of  worship  was  more  and  more 
brought  about  by  the  steady  pressure  of  the  Commission. 
The  old  liberty  which  had  been  allowed  in  London  and  the 
other  Protestant  parts  of  the  kingdom  was  no  longer  per- 
mitted to  exist.  The  leading  Puritan  clergy,  whose  non- 
conformity had  hitherto  been  winked  at,  were  called  upon 
to  submit  to  the  surplice,  and  to  make  the  sign  of  the  cross 
in  baptism.  The  remonstrances  of  the  country  gentry 
availed  as  little  as  the  protest  of  Lord  Burleigh  himself  to 
protect  two  hundred  of  the  best  ministers  from  being 
driven  from  their  parsonages  on  a  refusal  to  subscribe  to 
the  Three  Articles. 

But  the  political  danger  of  the  course  on  which  the 
Crown  had  entered  was  seen  in  the  rise  of  a  spirit  of  vig 
orous  opposition,  such  as  had  not  made  its  appearance 
since  the  accession  of  the  Tudors.  The  growing  power  of 
public  opinion  received  a  striking  recognition  in  the  strug- 
gle which  bears  the  name  of  the  "  Martin  Marprelate  con- 
troversy." The  Puritans  had  from  the  first  appealed  by 
their  pamphlets  from  the  Crown  to  the  people,  and  Arch- 
bishop Whitgift  bore  witness  to  their  influence  on  opinion 
by  his  efforts  to  gag  the  Press.  The  regulations  made  by 
th»  Star-Chamber  in  1585  for  this  purpose  are  memorable 
66  the  first  step  in  the  >.ong  struggle  of  government  after 


434  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH   PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

government  to  check  the  liberty  of  printing.  The  irregular 
censorship  which  had  long  existed  was  now  finally  organ- 
ized. Printing  was  restricted  to  London  and  the  two 
Universities,  the  number  of  printers  was  reduced,  and  all 
applicants  for  license  to  print  were  placed  under  the  super- 
vision of  the  Company  of  Stationers.  Every  publication, 
too,  great  or  small,  had  to  receive  the  approbation  of  the 
Primate  or  the  Bishop  of  London.  The  fi>st  result  of  this 
system  of  repression  was  the  appearance,  in  the  very  year 
of  the  Armada,  of  a  series  of  anonymous  pamphlets  bear- 
ing the  significant  name  of  "Martin  Marprelate,"  and 
issued  from  a  secret  press  which  found  refuge  from  the 
Royal  pursuivants  in  the  country-houses  of  the  gentry. 
The  press  was  at  last  seized ;  and  the  suspected  authors  of 
these  scurrilous  libels,  Penry,  a  young  Welshman,  and  a 
minister  named  Udall,  died,  the  one  in  prison,  the  other 
on  the  scaffold.  But  the  virulence  and  boldness  of  their 
language  produced  a  powerful  effect,  for  it  was  impossible 
under  the  system  of  Elizabeth  to  "mar"  the  bishops  with- 
out attacking  the  Crown ;  and  a  new  age  of  political  liberty 
was  felt  to  be  at  hand  when  Martin  Marprelate  forced  the 
political  and  ecclesiastical  measures  of  the  Government 
into  the  arena  of  public  discussion. 

The  strife  between  Puritanism  and  the  Crown  was  to 
grow  into  a  fatal  conflict,  but  at  the  moment  the  Queen's 
policy  was  in  the  main  a  wise  one.  It  was  no  time  for 
scaring  and  disuniting  the  mass  of  the  people  when  the 
united  energies  of  England  might  soon  hardly  suffice  to 
withstand  the  onset  of  Spain.  On  the  other  hand,  strike 
as  she  might  at  the  Puritan  party,  it  was  bound  to  support 
Elizabeth  in  the  coming  struggle  with  Philip.  For  the 
sense  of  personal  wrong  and  the  outcry  of  the  Catholic 
world  against  his  selfish  reluctance  to  avenge  the  blood 
of  its  martyrs  had  at  last  told  on  the  Spanish  King,  and 
in  1584  the  first  vessels  of  an  armada  which  was  destined 
for  the  conquest  of  England  began  to  gather  in  the  Tagus. 
Resentment  and  fanaticism  indeed  were  backed  by  a  cool 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  KEFORMATION.    1540-1608.  435 

policy.  The  gain  of  the  Portuguese  dominions  made  it 
only  the  more  needful  for  Philip  to  assert  his  mastery  of 
the  seas.  He  had  now  to  shut  Englishman  and  heretic 
not  only  out  of  the  New  World  of  the  West  but  out  of  the 
lucrative  traffic  with  the  East.  And  every  day  showed  a 
firmer  resolve  in  Englishmen  to  claim  the  New  World  for 
their  own.  The  plunder  of  Drake's  memorable  voyage 
had  lured  fresh  freebooters  to  the  "Spanish  Main."  The 
failure  of  Frobisher's  quest  for  gold  only  drew  the  nobler 
spirits  engaged  in  it  to  plans  of  colonization.  North 
America,  vexed  by  long  winters  and  thinly  peopled  by 
warlike  tribes  of  Indians,  gave  a  rough  welcome  to  the 
earlier  colonists;  and  after  a  fruitless  attempt  to  forma 
settlement  on  its  shores  Sir  Humphrey  Gilbert,  one  of  the 
noblest  spirits  of  his  time,  turned  homeward  again  to  find 
his  fate  in  the  stormy  seas.  "  We  are  as  near  to  heaven 
by  sea  as  by  land,"  were  the  famous  words  he  was  heard 
to  utter  ere  the  light  of  his  little  bark  was  lost  forever  in 
the  darkness  of  the  night.  But  an  expedition  sent  by  his 
brother-in-law,  Sir  Walter  Raleigh,  explored  Pamlico 
Sound ;  and  the  country  they  discovered,  a  country  where 
in  their  poetic  fancy  "  men  lived  after  the  manner  of  the 
Golden  Age,"  received  from  Elizabeth,  the  Virgin  Queen, 
the  name  of  Virginia. 

It  was  in  England  only  that  Philip  could  maintain  his 
exclusive  right  to  the  New  World  of  the  West;  it  was 
through  England  only  that  he  could  strike  a  last  and  fatal 
blow  at  the  revolt  of  the  Netherlands.  And  foiled  as  his 
plans  had  been  as  yet  by  the  overthrow  of  the  Papal 
schemes,  even  their  ruin  had  left  ground  for  hope  in  Eng- 
land itself.  The  tortures  and  hangings  of  the  Catholic 
priests,  the  fining  and  imprisonment  of  the  Catholic  gentry, 
had  roused  a  resentment  which  it  was  easy  to  mistake  for 
disloyalty.  The  Jesuits  with  Parsons  at  their  head  pictured 
the  English  Catholics  as  only  waiting  to  rise  in  rebellion 
at  the  call  of  Spain,  and  reported  long  lists  of  nobles  and 
squires  who  would  muster  their  tenants  to  join  Parma's 


436  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH    PEOPLE.     [Boon  VI. 

legions  on  their  landing.  A  Spanish  victory  would  be 
backed  by  insurrection  in  Ireland  and  attack  from  Scot- 
land. For  in  Scotland  the  last  act  of  the  Papal  conspiracy 
against  Elizabeth  was  still  being  played.  Though  as  yet 
under  age,  the  young  King,  James  the  Sixth,  had  taken 
on  himself  the  government  of  the  realm,  and  had  sub- 
mitted to  the  guidance  of  a  cousin,  Esme  Stuart,  who  had 
been  brought  up  in  France  and  returned  to  Scotland  a 
Catholic  and  a  fellow-plotter  with  the  Guises.  He  suc- 
ceeded in  bringing  Morton  to  the  block ;  and  the  death  of 
the  great  Protestant  leader  left  him  free  to  enlist  Scotland 
in  the  league  which  Home  was  forming  for  the  ruin  of 
Elizabeth.  The  revolt  in  Ireland  had  failed.  The  work 
of  the  Jesuits  in  England  had  just  ended  in  the  death  of 
Campian  and  the  arrest  of  his  followers.  But  with  the 
help  of  the  Guises  Scotland  might  yet  be  brought  to  rise 
in  arms  for  the  liberation  of  Mary  Stuart,  and  James 
might  reign  as  co-regent  with  his  mother,  if  he  were  con- 
verted to  the  Catholic  Church.  The  young  King,  anxious 
to  free  his  crown  from  the  dictation  of  the  nobles,  lent 
himself  to  his  cousin's  schemes.  For  the  moment  they 
were  foiled.  James  was  seized  by  the  Protestant  lords, 
and  the  Duke  of  Lennox,  as  Esme  Stuart,  was  now  called, 
driven  from  the  realm.  But  James  was  soon  free  again, 
and  again  in  correspondence  with  the  Guises  and  with 
Philip.  The  young  King  was  lured  by  promises  of  the 
hand  of  an  archduchess  and  the  hope  of  the  crowns  of 
both  England  and  Scotland.  The  real  aim  of  the  intriguers 
who  guided  him  was  to  set  him  aside  as  soon  as  the  victory 
was  won  and  to  restore  his  mother  to  the  throne.  But 
whether  Mary  were  restored  or  no  it  seemed  certain  that 
in  any  attack  on  Elizabeth  Spain  would  find  helpers  from 
among  the  Scots. 

Nor  was  the  opportunity  favorable  in  Scotland  alone. 
In  the  Netherlands  and  in  France  all  seemed  to  go  well 
for  Philip's  schemes.  From  the  moment  of  his  arrival  in 
the  Low  Countries  the  Prince  of  Parma  had  been  steadily 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  437 

winning  back  what  Alva  had  lost.  The  Union  of  Ghent 
had  been  broken.  The  ten  Catholic  provinces  were  being 
slowly  brought  anew  under  Spanish  rule.  Town  after 
town  was  regained.  From  Brabant  Parma  had  penetrated 
into  Flanders;  Ypres,  Bruges,  and  Ghent  had  fallen  into 
his  hands.  Philip  dealt  a  more  fatal  blow  at  his  rebellious 
subjects  in  the  murder  of  the  man  who  was  the  centre  of 
their  resistance.  For  years  past  William  of  Orange  had 
been  a  mark  for  assassin  after  assassin  in  Philip's  pay, 
and  in  1584  the  deadly  persistence  of  the  Spanish  King 
was  rewarded  by  his  fall.  Reft  indeed  as  they  were  of 
their  leader,  the  Netherlands  still  held  their  ground.  The 
union  of  Utrecht  stood  intact ;  and  Philip's  work  of  re- 
conquest  might  be  checked  at  any  moment  by  the  inter- 
vention of  England  or  of  France.  But  at  this  moment  all 
chance  of  French  intervention  passed  away.  Henry  the 
Third  was  childless,  and  the  death  of  his  one  remaining 
brother,  Francis  of  Anjou,  in  1584  left  the  young  chief  of 
the  house  of  Bourbon,  King  Henry  of  Navarre,  heir  to  the 
crown  of  France.  Henry  was  the  leader  of  the  Huguenot 
party,  and  in  January,  1585,  the  French  Catholics  bound 
themselves  in  a  holy  league  to  prevent  such  a  triumph  of 
heresy  in  the  realm  as  the  reign  of  a  Protestant  would 
bring  about  by  securing  the  succession  of  Henry's  uncle, 
the  cardinal  of  Bourbon.  The  Leaguers  looked  to  Philip 
for  support;  they  owned  his  cause  for  their  own;  and 
pledged  themselves  not  only  to  root  out  Protestantism  in 
France,  but  to  help  the  Spanish  King  in  rooting  it  out 
throughout  the  Netherlands.  The  League  at  once  over- 
shadowed the  Crown;  and  Henry  the  Third  could  only 
meet  the  blow  by  affecting  to  put  himself  at  its  head,  and 
by  revoking  the  edicts  of  toleration  in  favor  of  the  Hugue- 
nots. But  the  Catholics  disbelieved  in  his  sincerity;  they 
looked  only  to  Philip;  and  as  long  as  Philip  could  supply 
the  Leaguers  with  men  and  money,  he  felt  secure  on  the 
side  of  France. 

The  vanishing  of  all  hope  of  French  aid  was  the  more 


438  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

momentous  to  the  Netherlands  that  at  this  moment  Parma 
won  his  crowning  triumph  in  the  capture  of  Antwerp. 
Besieged  in  the  winter  of  1584,  the  city  surrendered  after 
a  brave  resistance  in  the  August  of  1585.  But  heavy  as 
was  the  blow,  it  brought  gain  as  well  as  loss  to  the  Nether- 
landers.  It  forced  Elizabeth  into  action.  She  refused  in- 
deed the  title  of  Protector  of  the  Netherlands  which  the 
States  offered  her,  and  compelled  them  to  place  Brill  and 
Flushing  in  her  hands  as  pledges  for  the  repayment  of  her 
expenses.  But  she  sent  aid.  Lord  Leicester  was  hurried 
to  the  Flemish  coast  with  eight  thousand  men.  In  a  yet 
bolder  spirit  of  defiance  Francis  Drake  was  suffered  to  set 
sail  with  a  fleet  of  twenty-five  vessels  for  the  Spanish  Main. 
The  two  expeditions  had  very  different  fortunes.  Drake's 
voyage  was  a  series  of  triumphs.  The  wrongs  inflicted  on 
English  seamen  by  the  Inquisition  were  requited  by  the 
burning  of  the  cities  of  St.  Domingo  and  Carthagena. 
The  coasts  of  Cuba  and  Florida  were  plundered,  and  though 
the  gold  fleet  escaped  him,  Drake  returned  in  the  summer 
of  1586  with  a  heavy  booty.  Leicester  on  the  other  hand 
was  paralyzed  by  his  own  intriguing  temper,  by  strife  with 
the  Queen,  and  by  his  military  incapacity.  Only  one  dis- 
astrous skirmish  at  Zutphen  broke  the  inaction  of  his 
forces,  while  Elizabeth  strove  vainly  to  use  the  presence 
of  his  army  to  force  Parma  and  the  States  alike  to  a  peace 
which  would  restore  Philip's  sovereignty  over  the  Nether- 
lands, but  leave  them  free  enough  to  serve  as  a  check  on 
Philip's  designs  against  herself. 

Foiled  as  she  was  in  securing  a  check  on  Philip  in  the 
Low  Countries,  the  Queen  was  more  successful  in  robbing 
him  of  the  aid  of  the  Scots.  The  action  of  King  James 
had  been  guided  by  his  greed  of  the  English  Crown,  and 
a  secret  promise  of  the  succession  sufficed  to  lure  him  from 
the  cause  of  Spain.  In  July,  1586,  he  formed  an  alliance, 
defensive  and  offensive,  with  Elizabeth,  and  pledged  him- 
self not  only  to  give  no  aid  to  revolt  in  Ireland,  but  to 
suppress  any  Catholic  rising  in  the  northern  counties.  The 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  439 

pledge  was  the  more  important  that  the  Catholic  resent- 
ment Deemed  passing  into  fanaticism.  Maddened  by  con- 
fiscation and  persecution,  by  the  hopelessness  of  rebellion 
within  or  of  deliverance  from  without,  the  fiercer  Catholics 
listened  to  schemes  of  assassination  to  which  the  murder 
of  William  of  Orange  lent  a  terrible  significance.  The 
detection  of  Somerville,  a  fanatic  who  had  received  the 
host  before  setting  out  for  London  "to  shoot  the  Queen 
with  his  dag,"  was  followed  by  measures  of  natural  se- 
verity, by  the  flight  and  arrest  of  Catholic  gentry  and 
peers,  by  a  vigorous  purification  of  the  Inns  of  Court 
where  a  few  Catholics  lingered,  and  by  the  dispatch  of 
fresh  batches  of  priests  to  the  block.  The  trial  and  death 
of  Parry,  a  member  of  the  House  of  Commons  who  had 
served  in  the  royal  household,  on  a  similar  charge,  fed  the 
general  panic.  The  leading  Protestants  formed  an  asso- 
ciation whose  members  pledged  themselves  to  pursue  to  the 
death  all  who  sought  the  Queen's  life,  and  all  on  whose 
behalf  it  was  sought.  The  association  soon  became  na- 
tional, and  the  Parliament  met  together  in  a  transport  of 
horror  and  loyalty  to  give  it  legal  sanction.  All  Jesuits 
and  seminary  priests  were  banished  from  the  realm  on 
pain  of  death,  and  a  bill  for  the  security  of  the  Queen  dis- 
qualified any  claimant  of  the  succession  who  instigated 
subjects  to  rebellion  or  hurt  to  the  Queen's  person  from 
ever  succeeding  to  the  Crown. 

The  threat  was  aimed  at  Mary  Stuart.  Weary  of  her 
long  restraint,  of  her  failure  to  rouse  Philip  or  Scotland  to 
her  aid,  of  the  baffled  revolt  of  the  English  Catholics  and 
the  baffled  intrigues  of  the  Jesuits,  Mary  had  bent  for  a 
moment  to  submission.  "Let  me  go,"  she  wrote  to  Eliza- 
beth; "let  me  retire  from  this  island  to  some  solitude 
where  I  may  prepare  my  soul  to  die.  Grant  this  and  1 
will  sign  away  every  right  which  either  I  or  mine  can 
claim."  But  the  cry  was  useless,  and  in  1586  her  despair 
found  a  new  and  more  terrible  hope  in  the  plots  against 
Elizabeth's  life.  She  knew  and  approved  the  vow  of  An- 


440  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

thony  Babington  and  a  band  of  young  Catholics,  for  the 
most  part  connected  with  the  royal  household,  to  kill  the 
Queen  and  seat  Mary  on  the  throne ;  but  plot  and  approval 
alike  passed  through  Walsingham's  hands,  and  the  seizure 
of  Mary's  correspondence  revealed  her  connivance  in  the 
scheme.  Babington  with  his  fellow-conspirators  were  at 
once  sent  to  the  block,  and  the  provisions  of  the  act  passed 
in  the  last  Parliament  were  put  in  force  against  Mary.  In 
spite  of  her  protest  a  Commision  of  Peers  sat  as  her  judges 
at  Fotheringay  Castle,  and  their  verdict  of  "  guilty"  an- 
nihilated under  the  provisions  of  the  statute  her  claim  to 
the  Crown.  The  streets  of  London  blazed  with  bonfires, 
and  peals  rang  out  from  steeple  to  steeple  at  the  news  of 
Mary's  condemnation ;  but  in  spite  of  the  prayer  of  Par- 
liament for  her  execution  and  the  pressure  of  the  Council 
Elizabeth  shrank  from  her  death.  The  force  of  public 
opinion  however  was  now  carrying  all  before  it,  and  after 
three  months  of  hesitation  the  unanimous  demand  of  her 
people  wrested  a  sullen  consent  from  the  Queen.  She  flung 
the  warrant  signed  upon  the  floor,  and  the  Council  took  on 
themselves  the  responsibility  of  executing  it.  On  the  8th 
of  February,  1587,  Mary  died  on  a  scaffold  which  was 
erected  in  the  castle-hall  at  Fotheringay  as  dauntlessly  as 
she  had  lived.  "Do  not  weep,"  she  said  to  her  ladies,  " I 
have  given  my  word  for  you."  "Tell  my  friends,"  she 
charged  Melville,  "that  I  die  a  good  Catholic." 

The  blow  was  hardly  struck  before  Elizabeth  turned 
with  fury  on  the  ministers  who  had  forced  her  hand. 
Cecil,  who  had  now  become  Lord  Burghley,  was  for  a 
while  disgraced,  and  Davison,  who  carried  the  warrant  to 
the  Council,  was  sent  to  the  Tower  to  atone  for  an  act 
which  shattered  the  policy  of  the  Queen.  The  death  of 
Mary  Stuart  in  fact  seemed  to  have  removed  the  last  ob- 
etacle  out  of  Philip's  way.  It  had  put  an  end  to  the  divi- 
sions of  the  English  Catholics.  To  the  Spanish  King,  as 
to  the  nearest  heir  in  blood  who  was  of  the  Catholic  Faith, 
Mary  bequeathed  her  rights  to  the  Crown,  and  the  hopes 


CHAP.  6.J  THE  REFORMATION.    1540-1608.  441 

of  her  more  passionate  adherents  were  from  that  moment 
bound  up  in  the  success  of  Spain.  The  blow  too  kindled 
afresh  the  fervor  of  the  Papacy,  and  Sixtus  the  Fifth 
offered  to  aid  Philip  with  money  in  his  invasion  of  the 
heretic  realm.  But  Philip  no  longer  needed  pressure  to 
induce  him  to  act.  Drake's  triumph  had  taught  him  that 
the  conquest  of  England  was  needful  for  the  security  of 
his  dominion  in  the  New  World,  and  for  the  mastery  of 
the  seas.  The  presence  of  an  English  army  in  Flanders 
convinced  him  that  the  road  to  the  conquest  of  the  States 
lay  through  England  itself.  Nor  did  the  attempt  seem  a 
very  perilous  one.  Allen  and  his  Jesuit  emissaries  assured 
Philip  that  the  bulk  of  the  nation  was  ready  to  rise  as  soon 
as  a  strong  Spanish  force  was  landed  on  English  shores 
They  numbered  off  the  great  lords  who  would  head  the  re 
volt,  the  Earls  of  Arundel  and  Northumberland,  who  wer* 
both  Catholics,  the  Earls  of  Worcester,  Cumberland,  Ox 
ford,  and  Southampton,  Viscount  Montacute,  the  Lords 
Dacres,  Morley,  Vaux,  Wharton,  Windsor,  Lumley,  and 
Stourton.  "  All  these,"  wrote  Allen,  "  will  follow  our  party 
when  they  see  themselves  supported  by  a  sufficient  foreign 
force."  Against  these  were  only  "the  new  nobles,  who 
are  hated  in  the  country,  "and  the  towns.  "  But  the  strength 
of  England  is  not  in  its  towns."  All  the  more  warlike 
counties  were  Catholic  in  their  sympathies ;  and  the  per- 
secution of  the  recusants  had  destroyed  the  last  traces  of 
their  loyalty  to  the  Queen.  Three  hundred  priests  had 
been  sent  across  the  sea  to  organize  the  insurrection,  and 
they  were  circulating  a  book  which  Allen  had  lately  pub- 
lished "  to  prove  that  it  is  not  only  lawful  but  our  bounden 
duty  to  take  up  arms  at  the  Pope's  bidding  and  to  fight 
for  the  Catholic  faith  against  the  Queen  and  other  here- 
tics." A  landing  in  the  Pope's  name  would  be  best,  but 
a  landing  in  Philip's  name  would  be  almost  as  secure  of 
success.  Trained  as  they  were  now  by  Allen  and  his 
three  hundred  priests,  English  Catholics  "  would  let  in 
Catholic  auxiliaries  of  any  nation,  for  they  have  learned 


442  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

to   hate  their  domestic  heretic  more  than  any  foreign 
power." 

What  truth  there  was  in  the  Jesuit  view  of  England 
time  was  to  prove.  But  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  Philip 
believed  it,  and  that  the  promise  of  a  Catholic  rising  was 
his  chief  inducement  to  attempt  an  invasion.  The  opera- 
tions of  Parma  therefore  were  suspended  with  a  view  to 
the  greater  enterprise,  and  vessels  and  supplies  for  the  fleet 
which  had  for  three  years  been  gathering  in  the  Tagus 
were  collected  from  every  port  of  the  Spanish  coast.  Only 
France  held  Philip  back.  He  dared  not  attack  England 
till  all  dread  of  a  counter-attack  from  France  was  removed ; 
and  though  the  rise  of  the  League  had  seemed  to  secure  this, 
its  success  had  now  become  more  doubtful.  The  King, 
who  had  striven  to  embarrass  it  by  placing  himself  at  its 
head,  gathered  round  him  the  politicians  and  the  moderate 
Catholics  who  saw  in  the  triumph  of  the  new  Duke  of 
Guise  the  ruin  of  the  monarchy ;  while  Henry  of  Navarre 
took  the  field  at  the  head  of  the  Huguenots,  and  won  in 
1587  the  victory  of  Coutras.  Guise  restored  the  balance 
by  driving  the  German  allies  of  Henry  from  the  realm ; 
but  the  Huguenots  were  still  unconquered,  and  the  King, 
standing  apart,  fed  a  struggle  which  lightened  for  him  the 
pressure  of  the  League.  Philip  was  forced  to  watch  the 
wavering  fortunes  of  the  struggle,  but  while  he  watched, 
another  blow  fell  on  him  from  the  sea.  The  news  of  the 
coming  Armada  called  Drake  again  to  action.  In  ApriL 
1587,  he  set  sail  with  thirty  small  barks,  burned  the  store- 
ships  and  galleys  in  the  harbor  of  Cadiz,  stormed  the  ports 
of  the  Faro,  and  was  only  foiled  in  his  aim  of  attacking 
the  Armada  itself  by  orders  from  home.  A  descent  upon 
Corunna  however  completed  what  Drake  called  his  "  singe- 
ing of  the  Spanish  king's  beard."  Elizabeth  used  the  dar- 
ing blow  to  back  some  negotiations  for  peace  which  she 
was  still  conducting  in  the  Netherlands.  But  on  Philip's 
side  at  least  these  negotiations  were  simply  delusive.  The 
Spanish  pride  had  been  touched  to  the  quick.  Amid 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540-1608.  443 

the  exchange  of  protocols  Parma  gathered  seventeen  thou- 
sand men  for  the  coming  invasion,  collected  a  fleet  of  flat 
bottomed  transports  at  Dunkirk,  and  waited  impatiently 
for  the  Armada  to  protect  his  crossing.  The  attack  of 
Drake  however,  the  death  of  its  first  admiral,  and  the 
winter  storms  delayed  the  fleet  from  sailing.  What  held 
it  back  even  more  effectually  was  the  balance  of  parties  in 
France.  But  in  the  spring  of  1588  Philip's  patience  was 
rewarded.  The  League  had  been  baffled  till  now  not  so 
much  by  the  resistance  of  the  Huguenots  as  by  the  attitude 
of  the  King.  So  long  as  Henry  the  Third  held  aloof  from 
both  parties  and  gave  a  rallying  point  to  the  party  of 
moderation  the  victory  of  the  Leaguers  was  impossible. 
The  difficulty  was  solved  by  the  daring  of  Henry  of  Guise. 
The  fanatical  populace  of  Paris  rose  at  his  call;  the  royal 
troops  were  beaten  off  from  the  barricades;  and  on  the 
12th  of  May  the  King  found  himself  a  prisoner  in  the 
hands  of  the  Duke.  Guise  was  made  lieutenant-general 
of  the  kingdom,  and  Philip  was  assured  on  the  side  of 
France. 

The  revolution  was  hardly  over  when  at  the  end  of  May 
the  Armada  started  from  Lisbon.  But  it  had  scarcely  put 
to  sea  when  a  gale  in  the  Bay  of  Biscay  drove  its  scattered 
vessels  into  Ferrol,  and  it  was  only  on  the  nineteenth  of 
July,  1588,  that  the  sails  of  the  Armada  were  seen  from  the 
Lizard,  and  the  English  beacons  flared  out  their  alarm 
along  the  coast.  The  news  found  England  ready.  An 
army  was  mustering  under  Leicester  at  Tilbury,  the  militia 
of  the  midland  counties  were  gathering  to  London,  while 
those  of  the  south  and  east  were  held  in  readiness  to  meet 
a  descent  on  either  shore.  The  force  which  Parma  hoped 
to  lead  consisted  of  forty  thousand  men,  for  the  Armada 
brought  nearly  twenty-two  thousand  soldiers  to  be  added 
to  the  seventeen  thousand  who  were  waiting  to  cross  from 
the  Netherlands.  Formidable  as  this  force  was,  it  was  far 
too  weak  by  itself  to  do  the  work  which  Philip  meant  it  to 
do.  Had  Parma  landed  on  the  earliest  day  he  purposed, 


444  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH   PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

he  would  have  found  his  way  to  London  barred  by  a  force 
stronger  than  his  own,  a  force,  too,  of  men  in  whose  ranks 
were  many  who  had  already  crossed  pikes  on  equal  terras 
with  his  best  infantry  in  Flanders.  "When  I  shall  have 
landed,"  he  warned  his  master,  "I  must  fight  battle  after 
battle,  I  shall  lose  men  by  wounds  and  disease,  I  must 
leave  detachments  behind  me  to  keep  open  my  communica- 
tions; and  in  a  short  time  the  body  of  my  army  will  be- 
come so  weak  that  not  only  I  may  be  unable  to  advance  in 
the  face  of  the  enemy,  and  time  may  be  given  to  the 
heretics  and  your  Majesty's  other  enemies  to  interfere,  but 
there  may  fall  out  some  notable  inconveniences,  with  the 
loss  of  everything,  and  I  be  unable  to  remedy  it."  What 
Philip  really  counted  on  was  the  aid  which  his  army 
would  find  within  England  itself.  Parma's  chance  of 
victory,  if  he  succeeded  in  landing,  lay  in  a  Catholic 
rising.  But  at  this  crisis  patriotism  proved  stronger  than 
religious  fanaticism  in  the  hearts  of  the  English  Catholics. 
The  news  of  invasion  ran  like  fire  along  the  English  coasts. 
The  whole  nation  answered  the  Queen's  appeal.  Instinct 
told  England  that  its  work  was  to  be  done  at  sea,  and  the 
royal  fleet  was  soon  lost  among  the  vessels  of  the  volun- 
teers. London,  when  Elizabeth  asked  for  fifteen  ships 
and  five  thousand  men,  offered  thirty  ships  and  ten  thou- 
sand seamen,  while  ten  thousand  of  its  train-bands  drilled 
in  the  Artillery  ground.  Every  seaport  showed  the  same 
temper.  Coasters  put  out  from  every  little  harbor.  Squires 
and  merchants  pushed  off  in  their  own  little  barks  for  a 
brush  with  the  Spaniards.  In  the  presence  of  the  stranger 
all  religious  strife  was  forgotten.  The  work  of  the  Jesuits 
was  undone  in  an  hour.  Of  the  nobles  and  squires  whose 
tenants  were  to  muster  under  the  flag  of  the  invader  not 
one  proved  a  traitor.  The  greatest  lords  on  Allen's  list  of 
Philip's  helpers,  Cumberland,  Oxford,  and  Northumber- 
land, brought  their  vessels  up  alongside  of  Drake  and  Lord 
Howard  as  soon  as  Philip's  fleet  appeared  in  the  Channel. 
The  Catholic  gentry  who  had  been  painted  as  longing  for 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  44fl 

the  coming  of  the  stranger,  led  their  tenantry,  when  the 
stranger  came,  to  the  muster  at  Tilbury. 

The  loyalty  of  the  Catholics  decided  the  fate  of  Philip's 
scheme.  Even  if  Parma's  army  succeeded  in  landing,  its 
task  was  now  an  impossible  one.  Forty  thousand  Spaniards 
were  no  match  for  four  millions  of  Englishmen,  banded 
together  by  a  common  resolve  to  hold  England  against  the 
foreigner.  But  to  secure  a  landing  at  all,  the  Spaniards 
had  to  be  masters  of  the  Channel.  Parma  might  gather 
his  army  on  the  Flemish  coast,  but  every  estuary  and  inlet 
was  blocked  by  the  Dutch  cruisers.  The  Netherlands 
knew  well  that  the  conquest  of  England  was  planned  only 
as  a  prelude  to  their  own  reduction ;  and  the  enthusiasm 
with  which  England  rushed  to  the  conflict  was  hardly 
greater  than  that  which  stirred  the  Hollanders.  A  fleet 
of  ninety  vessels,  with  the  best  Dutch  seamen  at  their 
head,  held  the  Scheldt  and  the  shallows  of  Dunkirk,  and 
it  was  only  by  driving  this  fleet  from  the  water  that 
Parma's  army  could  be  set  free  to  join  in  the  great  enter- 
prise. The  great  need  of  the  Armada  therefore  was  to 
reach  the  coast  of  Flanders.  It  was  ordered  to  make  for 
Calais,  and  wait  there  for  the  junction  of  Parma.  But 
even  if  Parma  joined  it,  the  passage  of  his  force  was  im- 
possible without  a  command  of  the  Channel ;  and  in  the 
Channel  lay  an  English  fleet  resolved  to  struggle  hard  for 
the  mastery.  As  the  Armada  sailed  on  in  a  broad  crescent 
past  Plymouth,  the  vessels  which  had  gathered  under  Lord 
Howard  of  Effingham  slipped  out  of  the  bay  and  hung 
with  the  wind  upon  their  rear.  In  numbers  the  two  forces 
were  strangely  unequal,  for  the  English  fleet  counted  only 
eighty  vessels  against  the  hundred  and  thirty-two  which 
composed  the  Armada.  In  size  of  ships  the  disproportion 
was  even  greater.  Fifty  of  the  English  vessels,  including 
the  squadron  of  the  Lord  Admiral  and  the  craft  of  the 
volunteers,  were  little  bigger  than  yachts  of  the  present 
day.  Even  of  the  thirty  Queen's  ships  which  formed  i 
main  body,  there  were  but  four  which  equalled  in  tonnage 


446  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VL 

the  smallest  of  the  Spanish  galleons.  Sixty-five  of  these 
galleons  formed  the  most  formidable  half  of  the  Spanish 
fleet ;  and  four  galleasses,  or  gigantic  galleys,  armed  with 
fifty  guns  apiece,  fifty-six  armed  merchantmen,  and  twenty 
pinnaces  made  up  the  rest.  The  Armada  was  provided 
with  2,500  cannons,  and  a  vast  store  of  provisions ;  it  had 
on  board  8,000  seamen  and  more  than  20,000  soldiers ;  and 
if  a  court-favorite,  the  Duke  of  Medina  Sidonia,  had  been 
placed  at  its  head,  he  was  supported  by  the  ablest  staff  of 
naval  officers  which  Spain  possessed. 

Small  however  as  the  English  ships  were,  they  were  in 
perfect  trim;  they  sailed  two  feet  for  the  Spaniards'  one, 
they  were  manned  with  9,000  hardy  seamen,  and  their 
Admiral  was  backed  by  a  crowd  of  captains  who  had  won 
fame  in  the  Spanish  seas.  With  him  was  Hawkins,  who 
had  been  the  first  to  break  into  the  charmed  circle  of  the 
Indies;  Frobisher,  the  hero  of  the  Northwest  passage; 
and,  above  all,  Drake,  who  held  command  of  the  privateers. 
They  had  won,  too,  the  advantage  of  the  wind ;  and,  closing 
in  or  drawing  off  as  they  would,  the  lightly-handled  Eng- 
lish vessels,  which  fired  four  shots  to  the  Spaniards'  one, 
hung  boldly  on  the  rear  of  the  great  fleet  as  it  moved  along 
the  Channel.  "The  feathers  of  the  Spaniard,"  in  the 
phrase  of  the  English  seamen,  were  "plucked  one  by  one." 
Galleon  after  galleon  was  sunk,  boarded,  driven  on  shore ; 
and  yet  Medina  Sidonia  failed  in  bringing  his  pursuers  to 
a  close  engagement.  Now  halting,  now  moving  slowly  on, 
the  running  fight  between  the  two  fleets  lasted  throughout 
the  week,  till  on  Sunday,  the  twenty-eighth  of  July,  the 
Armada  dropped  anchor  in  Calais  roads.  The  time  had 
come  for  sharper  work  if  the  junction  of  the  Armada  with 
Parma  was  to  be  prevented ;  for,  demoralized  as  the  Span- 
iards had  been  by  the  merciless  chase,  their  loss  in  ships 
had  not  been  great,  and  their  appearance  off  Dunkirk 
might  drive  off  the  ships  of  the  Hollanders  who  hindered 
the  sailing  of  the  Duke.  On  the  other  hand,  though  the 
numbers  of  English  ships  had  grown,  their  supplies  of  food 


CHAP.  6.]          THE  REFORMATION.    1640-1008.  447 

and  ammunition  were  fast  running  out.  Howard  there- 
fore resolved  to  force  an  engagement;  and,  lighting  eight 
fire-ships  at  midnight,  sent  them  down  with  the  tide  upon 
the  Spanish  line.  The  galleons  at  once  cut  their  cables 
and  stood  out  in  panic  to  sea,  drifting  with  the  wind  in  a 
long  line  off  Gravelines.  Drake  resolved  at  all  costs  to 
prevent  their  return.  At  dawn  on  the  twenty-ninth  the 
English  ships  closed  fairly  in,  and  almost  their  last  car- 
tridge  was  spent  ere  the  sun  went  down. 

Hard  as  the  fight  had  been,  it  seemed  far  from  a  decisive 
one.  Three  great  galleons  indeed  had  sunk  in  the  engage- 
ment, three  had  drifted  helplessly  on  to  the  Flemish  coast, 
but  the  bulk  of  the  Spanish  vessels  remained,  and  even  to 
Drake  the  fleet  seemed  "wonderful  great  and  strong." 
Within  the  Armada  itself  however  all  hope  was  gone. 
Huddled  together  by  the  wind  and  the  deadly  English  fire, 
their  sails  torn,  their  masts  shot  away,  the  crowded  gal- 
leons had  become  mere  slaughter-houses.  Four  thousand 
men  had  fallen,  and  bravely  as  the  seamen  fought,  they 
were  cowed  by  the  terrible  butchery.  Medina  himself  was 
in  despair.  "We  are  lost,  Senor  Oquenda,"  he  cried  to 
his  bravest  captain;  "what  are  we  to  do?"  "Let  others 
talk  of  being  lost,"  replied  Oquenda,  "your  Excellency  has 
only  to  order  up  fresh  cartridge. "  But  Oquenda  stood  alone, 
and  a  council  of  war  resolved  on  retreat  to  Spain  by  the  one 
course  open,  that  of  a  circuit  round  the  Orkneys.  "  Never 
anything  pleased  me  better,"  wrote  Drake,  "than  seeing 
the  enemy  fly  with  a  southerly  wind  to  the  northward. 
Have  a  good  eye  to  the  Prince  of  Parma,  for,  with  the 
grace  of  God,  I  doubt  not  ere  it  be  long  so  to  handle  the 
matter  with  the  Duke  of  Sidonia,  as  he  shall  wish  himself 
at  St.  Mary  Port  among  his  orange  trees."  But  the  work 
of  destruction  was  reserved  for  a  mightier  foe  than  Drake. 
The  English  vessels  were  soon  forced  to  give  up  the  chase 
by  the  running  out  of  their  supplies.  But  the  Spanish 
ships  had  no  sooner  reached  the  Orkneys  than  the  storms 
of  the  northern  seas  broke  on  them  with  a  fury  before 


448  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 


which  all  concert  and  union  disappeared.  In  October  fifty 
reached  Corunna,  bearing  ten  thousand  men  stricken  with 
pestilence  and  death.  Of  the  rest  some  were  sunk,  some 
dashed  to  pieces  against  the  Irish  cliffs.  The  wreckers  of 
the  Orkneys  and  the  Faroes,  the  clansmen  of  the  Scottish 
Isles,  the  kernes  of  Donegal  and  Galway,  all  had  their  part 
in  the  work  of  murder  and  robbery.  Eight  thousand 
Spaniards  perished  between  the  Giant's  Causeway  and  the 
Blaskets.  On  a  strand  near  Sligo  an  English  captain 
numbered  eleven  hundred  corpses  which  had  been  cast  up 
by  the  sea.  The  flower  of  the  Spanish  nobility,  who  had 
been  sent  on  the  new  crusade  under  Alonzo  da  Leyva, 
after  twice  suffering  shipwreck,  put  a  third  time  to  sea  to 
founder  on  a  reef  near  Dunluce. 

"  I  sent  my  ships  against  men,"  said  Philip  when  the 
news  reached  him,  "not  against  the  seas."  It  was  in 
nobler  tone  that  England  owned  her  debt  to  the  storm  that 
drove  the  Armada  to  its  doom.  On  the  medal  that  com- 
memorated its  triumph  were  graven  the  words,  "  The  Lord 
sent  his  wind,  and  scattered  them."  The  pride  of  the 
conquerors  was  hushed  before  their  sense  of  a  mighty  de- 
liverance. It  was  not  till  England  saw  the  broken  host 
"  fly  with  a  southerly  wind  to  the  north"  that  she  knew 
what  a  weight  of  fear  she  had  borne  for  thirty  years.  The 
victory  over  the  Armada,  the  deliverance  from  Spain,  the 
rolling  away  of  the  Catholic  terror  which  had  hung  like  a 
cloud  over  the  hopes  of  the  new  people,  was  like  a  passing 
from  death  unto  life.  Within  as  without,  the  dark  sky 
suddenly  cleared.  The  national  unity  proved  stronger 
than  the  religious  strife.  When  the  Catholic  lords  flocked 
to  the  camp  at  Tilbury,  or  put  off  to  join  the  fleet  in  the 
Channel,  Elizabeth  could  pride  herself  on  a  victory  as 
great  as  the  victory  over  the  Armada.  She  had  won  it  by 
her  patience  and  moderation,  by  her  refusal  to  lend  herself 
to  the  fanaticism  of  the  Puritan  or  the  reaction  of  the 
Papist,  by  her  sympathy  with  the  mass  of  the  people,  by 
her  steady  and  unflinching  preference  of  national  unity  to 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  449 

any  passing  considerations  of  safety  or  advantage.  For 
thirty  years,  amid  the  shock  of  religious  passions  at  home 
and  abroad,  she  had  reigned  not  as  a  Catholic  or  as  a 
Protestant  Queen,  but  as  a  Queen  of  England,  and  it  was 
to  England,  Catholic  and  Protestant  alike,  that  she  could 
appeal  in  her  hour  of  need.  "Let  tyrants  fear,"  she  ex- 
claimed in  words  that  still  ring  like  the  sound  of  a  trumpet, 
as  she  appeared  among  her  soldiers.  "Let  tyrants  fear! 
I  have  always  so  behaved  myself  that  under  God  I  have 
placed  my  chiefest  strength  and  safeguard  in  the  loyal 
hearts  and  good-will  of  my  subjects  And  therefore  I  am 
come  among  you,  as  you  see,  resolved  in  the  midst  and 
heat  of  the  battle  to  live  and  die  among  you  all."  The 
work  of  Edward  and  of  Mary  was  undone,  and  the  strife 
of  religions  fell  powerless  before  the  sense  of  a  common 
country. 

IsTor  were  the  results  of  the  victory  less  momentous  to 
Europe  at  large.  What  Wolsey  and  Henry  had  struggled 
for,  Elizabeth  had  done.  At  her  accession  England  was 
scarcely  reckoned  among  European  powers.  The  wisest 
statesmen  looked  on  her  as  doomed  to  fall  into  the  hands 
of  France,  or  to  escape  that  fate  by  remaining  a  depend- 
ency of  Spain.  But  the  national  independence  had  grown 
with  the  national  life.  France  was  no  longer  a  danger, 
Scotland  was  no  longer  a  foe.  Instead  of  hanging  on  the 
will  of  Spain,  England  had  fronted  Spain  and  conquered 
her.  She  now  stood  on  a  footing  of  equality  with  the 
greatest  powers  of  the  world.  Her  military  weight  indeed 
was  drawn  from  the  discord  which  rent  the  peoples  about 
her,  and  would  pass  away  with  its  close.  But  a  new  and 
lasting  greatness  opened  on  the  sea.  She  had  sprung  at  a 
bound  into  a  great  sea-power.  Her  fleets  were  spreading 
terror  through  the  New  World  as  through  the  Old.  When 
Philip  by  his  conquest  of  Portugal  had  gathered  the  two 
greatest  navies  of  the  world  into  his  single  hand,  England 
had  faced  him  and  driven  his  fleet  from  the  seas.  But 
the  rise  of  England  was  even  less  memorable  than  the  fall 


460  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

of  Spain.  That  Spain  had  fallen  few  of  the  world's  states- 
men saw  then.  Philip  thanked  God  that  he  could  easily, 
if  he  chose,  "place  another  fleet  upon  the  seas,"  and  the 
dispatch  of  a  second  armada  soon  afterward  showed  that 
his  boast  was  a  true  one.  But  what  had  vanished  was  his 
mastery  of  the  seas.  The  defeat  of  the  Armada  was  the 
first  of  a  series  of  defeats  at  the  hands  of  the  English  and 
the  Dutch.  The  naval  supremacy  of  Spain  was  lost,  and 
with  it  all  was  lost.  An  empire  so  widely  scattered  over 
the  world,  and  whose  dominions  were  parted  by  interven- 
ing nations,  could  only  be  held  together  by  its  command 
of  the  seas.  One  century  saw  Spain  stripped  of  the  bulk  of 
the  Netherlands,  another  of  her  possessions  in  Italy,  a 
third  of  her  dominions  in  the  New  World.  But  slowly  as 
her  empire  broke,  the  cause  of  ruin  was  throughout  the 
same.  It  was  the  loss  of  her  maritime  supremacy  that 
robbed  her  of  all,  and  her  maritime  supremacy  was  lost  in 
the  wreck  of  the  Armada. 

If  Philip  met  the  shock  with  a  calm  patience,  it  at  once 
ruined  his  plans  in  the  West.  France  broke  again  from 
his  grasp.  Since  the  day  of  the  Barricades  Henry  the 
Third  had  been  virtually  a  prisoner  in  the  hands  of  the 
Duke  of  Guise ;  but  the  defeat  of  the  Armada  woke  him 
to  a  new  effort  for  the  recovery  of  power,  and  at  the  close 
of  1588  Guise  was  summoned  to  his  presence  and  stabbed 
as  he  entered  by  the  royal  body-guard.  The  blow  broke 
the  strength  of  the  League.  The  Duke  of  Mayenne,  a 
brother  of  the  victim,  called  indeed  the  Leaguers  to  arms; 
and  made  war  upon  the  King.  But  Henry  found  help  in 
his  cousin,  Henry  of  Navarre,  who  brought  a  Huguenot 
force  to  his  aid ;  and  the  moderate  Catholics  rallied  as  of 
old  round  the  Crown.  The  Leaguers  called  on  Philip  for 
aid,  but  Philip  was  forced  to  guard  against  attack  at  home. 
Elizabeth  had  resolved  to  give  blow  for  blow.  The  Portu- 
guese were  writhing  under  Spanish  conquest;  and  a 
claimant  of  the  crown,  Don  Antonio,  who  had  found 
refuge  in  England,  promised  that  on  his  landing  the  coun- 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1603.  451 

try  would  rise  in  arms.  In  the  spring  of  1589  therefor 
an  expedition  of  fifty  vessels  and  15,000  men  was  sent 
under  Drake  and  Sir  John  Norris  against  Lisbon.  Its 
chances  of  success  hung  on  a  quick  arrival  in  Portugal, 
but  the  fleet  touched  at  Corunna,  and  after  burning  the 
ships  in  its  harbor  the  army  was  tempted  to  besiege  the 
town.  A  Spanish  army  which  advanced  to  its  relief  was 
repulsed  by  an  English  force  of  half  its  numbers.  Corunna 
however  held  stubbornly  out,  and  in  the  middle  of  May 
Norris  was  forced  to  break  the  siege  and  to  sail  to  Lisbon. 
But  the  delay  had  been  fatal  to  his  enterprise.  The  coun- 
try did  not  rise;  the  English  troops  were  thinned  with 
sickness;  want  of  cannon  hindered  a  siege;  and  after  a 
fruitless  march  up  the  Tagus  Norris  fell  back  on  the  fleet. 
The  coast  was  pillaged,  and  the  expedition  returned  baffled 
to  England.  Luckless  as  the  campaign  had  proved,  the 
bold  defiance  of  Spain  and  the  defeat  of  a  Spanish  army 
on  Spanish  ground  kindled  a  new  daring  in  Englishmen 
while  they  gave  new  heart  to  Philip's  enemies.  In  the 
summer  of  1589  Henry  the  Third  laid  siege  to  Paris.  The 
fears  of  the  League  were  removed  by  the  knife  of  a  priest, 
Jacques  Clement,  who  assassinated  the  King  in  August ; 
but  Henry  of  Navarre,  or,  as  he  now  became,  Henry  the 
Fourth,  stood  next  to  him  in  line  of  blood,  and  Philip  saw 
with  dismay  a  Protestant  mount  the  throne  of  France. 

From  this  moment  the  thought  of  attack  on  England, 
even  his  own  warfare  in  the  Netherlands,  was  subordinated 
in  the  mind  of  the  Spanish  King  to  the  need  of  crushing 
Henry  the  Fourth.  It  was  not  merely  that  Henry's  Prot- 
estantism threatened  to  spread  heresy  over  the  West. 
Catholic  or  Protestant,  the  union  of  France  under  an  active 
and  enterprising  ruler  would  be  equally  fatal  to  Philip's 
designs.  Once  gathered  round  its  King,  France  was  a 
nearer  obstacle  to  the  re-conquest  of  the  Netherlands  than 
ever  England  could  be.  On  the  other  hand,  the  religious 
strife,  to  which  Henry's  accession  gave  a  fresh  life  and 
vigor,  opened  wide  prospects  to  Philip's  ambition.  Far 


45»  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

from  proving  a  check  upon  Spain,  it  seemed  as  if  France 
might  be  turned  into  a  Spanish  dependence.  While  the 
Leaguers  proclaimed  the  Cardinal  of  Bourbon  King,  under 
the  name  of  Charles  the  Tenth,  they  recognized  Philip  as 
Protector  of  France.  Their  hope  indeed  lay  in  his  aid, 
and  their  army  was  virtually  his  own.  On  the  other  band 
Henry  the  Fourth  was  environed  with  difficulties.  It  was 
only  by  declaring  his  willingness  to  be  "  further  instructed" 
in  matters  of  faith,  in  other  words  by  holding  out  hopes  of 
his  conversion,  that  he  succeeded  in  retaining  the  moder- 
ate Catholics  under  his  standard.  His  desperate  bravery 
alone  won  a  victory  at  Yvry  over  the  forces  of  the  League, 
which  enabled  him  to  again  form  the  siege  of  Paris  in  1590. 
All  recognized  Paris  as  the  turning-point  in  the  struggle, 
and  the  League  called  loudly  for  Philip's  aid.  To  give  it 
was  to  break  the  work  which  Parma  was  doing  in  the 
Netherlands,  and  to  allow  the  United  Provinces  a  breath- 
ing space  in  their  sorest  need.  But  even  the  Netherlands 
were  of  less  moment  than  the  loss  of  France ;  and  Philip's 
orders  forced  Parma  to  march  to  the  relief  of  Paris.  The 
work  was  done  with  a  skill  which  proved  the  Duke  to  be 
a  master  in  the  art  of  war.  The  siege  of  Paris  was  raised ; 
the  efforts  of  Henry  to  bring  the  Spaniards  to  an  engage- 
ment were  foiled;  and  it  was  only  when  the  King's  army 
broke  up  from  sheer  weariness  that  Parma  withdrew  un- 
harmed to  the  north. 

England  was  watching  the  struggle  of  Henry  the  Fourth 
with  a  keen  interest.  The  failure  of  the  expedition  against 
Lisbon  had  put  an  end  for  the  time  to  any  direct  attacks 
upon  Spain,  and  the  exhaustion  of  the  treasury  forced 
Elizabeth  to  content  herself  with  issuing  commissions  to 
volunteers.  But  the  war  was  a  national  one,  and  the  na- 
tion waged  it  for  itself.  Merchants,  gentlemen,  nobles 
fitted  out  privateers.  The  sea-dogs  in  ever-growing 
numbers  scoured  the  Spanish  Main.  Their  quest  had  its 
ill  chances  as  it  had  its  good,  and  sometimes  the  prizes 
made  were  far  from  paying  for  the  cost  of  the  venture. 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  453 

"Paul  might  plant,  and  Apollos  might  water,"  John 
Hawkins  explained  after  an  unsuccessful  voyage,  "  but  it 
is  God  only  that  giveth  the  increase!"  But  more  often 
the  profit  was  enormous.  Spanish  galleons,  Spanish  mer- 
chant-ships, were  brought  month  after  month  to  English 
harbors.  The  daring  of  the  English  seamen  faced  any 
odds.  Ten  English  trading  vessels  beat  off  twelve  Spanish 
war-galleys  in  the  Straits  of  Gibraltar.  Sir  Richard 
Grenville  in  a  single  bark,  the  Revenge,  found  himself 
girt  in  by  fifty  men-of-war,  each  twice  as  large  as  his 
own.  He  held  out  from  afternoon  to  the  following  day- 
break, beating  off  attempt  after  attempt  to  board  him ;  and 
it  was  not  till  his  powder  was  spent,  more  than  half  his 
crew  killed,  and  the  rest  wounded,  that  the  ship  struck  its 
flag.  Grenville  had  refused  to  surrender,  and  was  carried 
mortally  wounded  to  die  in  a  Spanish  ship.  "  Here  die  I, 
Richard  Grenville,"  were  his  last  words,  "with  a  joyful 
and  a  quiet  mind,  for  that  I  have  ended  my  life  as  a  good 
soldier  ought  to  do,  who  has  fought  for  his  country  and 
his  queen,  for  honor  and  religion."  But  the  drift  of  the 
French  war  soon  forced  Elizabeth  back  again  into  the 
strife.  In  each  of  the  French  provinces  the  civil  war 
went  on :  and  in  Brittany,  where  the  contest  raged  fiercest, 
Philip  sent  the  Leaguers  a  supply  of  Spanish  troops.  Nor- 
mandy was  already  in  Catholic  hands,  and  the  aim  of  the 
Spanish  King  was  to  secure  the  western  coast  for  future 
operations  against  England.  Elizabeth  pressed  Henry  the 
Fourth  to  foil  these  projects,  and  in  the  winter  of  1591  she 
sent  money  and  men  to  aid  him  in  the  siege  of  Rouen. 

To  save  Rouen  Philip  was  again  forced  to  interrupt  his 
work  of  conquest  in  the  Netherlands.  Parma  marched 
anew  into  the  heart  of  France,  and  with  the  same  consum- 
mate generalship  as  of  old  relieved  the  town  without  giv- 
ing Henry  a  chance  of  battle.  But  the  day  was  fast  going 
against  the  Leaguers.  The  death  of  the  puppet-king, 
Charles  the  Tenth,  left  them  without  a  sovereign  to  oppose 
to  Henry  of  Navarre;  and  their  scheme  of  conferring  the 


454  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

crown  on  Isabella,  Philip's  daughter  by  Elizabeth  of 
France,  with  a  husband  whom  Philip  should  choose, 
awoke  jealousies  in  the  house  of  Guise  itself,  while  it 
gave  strength  to  the  national  party  who  shrank  from  lay- 
ing France  at  the  feet  of  Spain.  Even  the  Parliament  of 
Paris,  till  now  the  centre  of  Catholic  fanaticism,  protested 
against  setting  the  crown  of  France  on  the  brow  of  a 
stranger.  The  politicians  drew  closer  to  Henry  of  Navarre, 
and  the  moderate  Catholics  pressed  for  his  reconciliation 
to  the  Church  as  a  means  of  restoring  unity  to  the  realm. 
The  step  had  become  so  inevitable  that  even  the  Protes- 
tants were  satisfied  with  Henry's  promise  of  toleration ;  and 
in  the  summer  of  1593  he  declared  himself  a  Catholic. 
With  his  conversion  the  civil  war  came  practically  to  an 
end.  It  was  in  vain  that  Philip  strove  to  maintain  the 
zeal  of  the  Leaguers,  or  that  the  Guises  stubbornly  kept 
the  field.  All  France  drew  steadily  to  the  King.  Paris 
opened  her  gates  in  the  spring  of  1594,  and  the  chief  of 
the  Leaguers,  the  Duke  of  Mayenne,  submitted  at  the  close 
of  the  year.  Even  Rome  abandoned  the  contest,  and  at 
the  end  of  1595  Henry  received  solemn  absolution  from 
Clement  the  Eighth.  From  that  moment  France  rose 
again  into  her  old  power,  and  the  old  national  policy  of 
opposition  to  the  House  of  Austria  threw  her  weight  into 
the  wavering  balance  of  Philip's  fortunes.  The  death  of 
Parma  had  already  lightened  the  peril  of  the  United  Prov- 
inces, but  though  their  struggle  in  the  Low  Countries  was 
to  last  for  years,  from  the  moment  of  Henry  the  Fourth's 
conversion  their  independence  was  secure.  Nor  was  the 
restoration  of  the  French  monarchy  to  its  old  greatness  of 
less  moment  to  England.  Philip  was  yet  to  send  an  armada 
against  her  coasts ;  he  was  again  to  stir  up  a  fierce  revolt 
in  northern  Ireland.  But  all  danger  from  Spain  was  over 
with  the  revival  of  France.  Even  were  England  to  shrink 
from  a  strife  in  which  she  had  held  Philip  so  gloriously  at 
bay,  French  policy  would  never  suffer  the  island  to  fall 
unaided  under  the  power  of  Spain.  The  fear  of  foreign 


CHAP.  6.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540-1608.  455 

conquest  passed  away.  The  long  struggle  for  sheer  exist- 
ence was  over.  What  remained  was  the  Protestantism, 
the  national  union,  the  lofty  patriotism,  the  pride  in  Eng- 
land and  the  might  of  Englishmen,  which  had  drawn  life 
more  vivid  and  intense  than  they  had  ever  known  before 
from  the  long  battle  with  the  Papacy  and  with  Spain. 


20  VOL.  2 


CHAPTER  VII. 

ENGLAND  OP  SHAKSPEBE. 
1583—1603. 

THE  defeat  of  the  Armada,  the  deliverance  from  Cathol- 
icism and  Spain,  marked  the  critical  moment  in  our  polit- 
ical development.  From  that  hour  England's  destiny  was 
fixed.  She  was  to  be  a  Protestant  power.  Her  sphere  of 
action  was  to  be  upon  the  seas.  She  was  to  claim  her  part 
in  the  New  World  of  the  West.  But  the  moment  was  as 
critical  in  her  intellectual  development.  As  yet  English 
literature  had  lagged  behind  the  literature  of  the  rest  of 
Western  Christendom.  It  was  now  to  take  its  place  among 
the  greatest  literatures  of  the  world.  The  general  awaken- 
ing of  national  life,  the  increase  of  wealth,  of  refinement, 
and  leisure  that  characterized  the  reign  of  Elizabeth,  was 
accompanied  by  a  quickening  of  intelligence.  The  Renas- 
cence had  done  little  for  English  letters.  The  overpower- 
ing influence  of  the  new  models  both  of  thought  and  style 
which  it  gave  to  the  world  in  the  writers  of  Greece  and 
Rome  was  at  first  felt  only  as  a  fresh  check  to  the  revival 
of  English  poetry  or  prose.  Though  England  shared  more 
than  any  European  country  in  the  political  and  ecclesias- 
tical results  of  the  New  Learning,  its  literary  results  were 
far  less  than  in  the  rest  of  Europe,  in  Italy,  or  Germany, 
or  France.  More  alone  ranks  among  the  great  classical 
scholars  of  the  sixteenth  century.  Classical  learning  in- 
deed all  but  perished  at  the  Universities  in  the  storm  of 
the  Reformation,  nor  did  it  revive  there  till  the  close  of 
Elizabeth's  reign.  Insensibly  however  the  influences  of 
the  Renascence  fertilized  the  intellectual  soil  of  England 
for  the  rich  harvest  that  was  to  come.  The  court  poetry 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1608.  457 

which  clustered  round  Wyatt  and  Surrey,  exotic  and  imi- 
tative as  it  was,  promised  a  new  life  for  English  verse. 
The  growth  of  grammar-schools  realized  the  dream  of  Sir 
Thomas  More,  and  brought  the  middle-classes,  from  the 
squire  to  the  petty  tradesman,  into  contact  with  the 
masters  of  Greece  and  Rome.  The  love  of  travel,  which 
became  so  remarkable  a  characteristic  of  Elizabeth's  age, 
quickened  the  temper  of  the  wealthier  nobles.  "Home- 
keeping  youths,"  says  Shakspere  in  words  that  mark  the 
time,  "  have  ever  homely  wits ;"  and  a  tour  over  the  Con- 
tinent became  part  of  the  education  of  a  gentleman.  Fair- 
fax's version  of  Tasso,  Harrington's  version  of  Ariosto, 
were  signs  of  the  influence  which  the  literature  of  Italy, 
the  land  to  which  travel  led  most  frequently,  exerted  on 
English  minds.  The  classical  writers  told  upon  England 
at  large  when  they  were  popularized  by  a  crowd  of  trans- 
lations. Chapman's  noble  version  of  Homer  stands  high 
above  its  fellows,  but  all  the  greater  poets  and  historians 
of  the  ancient  world  were  turned  into  English  before  the 
close  of  the  sixteenth  century. 

It  is  characteristic  of  England  that  the  first  kind  of 
literature  to  rise  from  its  long  death  was  the  literature  of 
history.  But  the  form  in  which  it  rose  marked  the  differ- 
ence between  the  world  in  which  it  had  perished  and  that 
in  which  it  reappeared.  During  the  Middle  Ages  the 
world  had  been  without  a  past,  save  the  shadowy  and  un- 
known past  of  early  Rome ;  and  annalist  and  chronicler 
told  the  story  of  the  years  which  went  before  as  a  preface 
to  their  tale  of  the  present  without  a  sense  of  any  differ- 
ence between  them.  But  the  religious,  social,  and  political 
change  which  passed  over  England  under  the  New  Mon- 
archy broke  tho  continuity  of  its  life ;  and  the  depth  of  the 
rift  between  the  two  ages  is  seen  by  the  way  in  which 
History  passes  on  its  revival  under  Elizabeth  from  the 
medisBval  form  of  pure  narrative  to  its  modern  form  of  an 
investigation  and  reconstruction  of  the  past.  The  new 
interest  which  attached  to  the  bygone  world  led  to  the  col- 


458  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

lection  of  its  annals,  their  reprinting  and  embodiment  in 
an  English  shape.  It  was  his  desire  to  give  the  Elizabethan 
Church  a  basis  in  the  past,  as  much  as  any  pure  zeal  for 
letters,  which  induced  Archbishop  Parker  to  lead  the  way 
in  the  first  of  these  labors.  The  collection  of  historical 
manuscripts  which,  following  in  the  track  of  Leland,  he 
rescued  from  the  wreck  of  the  monastic  libraries  created  a 
school  of  antiquarian  imitators,  whose  research  and  in- 
dustry have  preserved  for  us  almost  every  work  of  per- 
manent historical  value  which  existed  before  the  Dissolu- 
tion of  the  Monasteries.  To  his  publication  of  some  of  our 
earlier  chronicles  we  owe  the  series  of  similar  publications 
which  bear  the  name  of  Camden,  Twysden,  and  Gale. 
But  as  a  branch  of  literature,  English  History  in  the  new 
shape  which  we  have  noted  began  in  the  work  of  the  poet 
Daniel.  The  chronicles  of  Stowe  and  Speed,  who  preceded 
him,  are  simple  records  of  the  past,  often  copied  almost 
literally  from  the  annals  they  used,  and  utterly  without 
style  or  arrangement ;  while  Daniel,  inaccurate  and  super- 
ficial as  he  is,  gave  his  story  a  literary  form  and  embodied 
it  in  a  pure  and  graceful  prose.  Two  larger  works  at  the 
close  of  Elizabeth's  reign,  the  "  History  of  the  Turks"  by 
Knolles  and  Raleigh's  vast  but  unfinished  plan  of  the 
"History  of  the  World,"  showed  a  widening  of  historic  in- 
terest beyond  national  bounds  to  which  it  had  hitherto 
been  confined. 

A  far  higher  development  of  our  literature  sprang  from 
the  growing  influence  which  Italy  was  exerting,  partly 
through  travel  and  partly  through  its  poetry  and  romances, 
on  the  manners  and  taste  of  the  time.  Men  made  more 
account  of  a  story  of  Boccaccio's,  it  was  said,  than  of  a 
story  from  the  Bible.  The  dress,  the  speech,  the  manners 
of  Italy  became  objects  of  almost  passionate  imitation,  and 
of  an  imitation  not  always  of  the  wisest  or  noblest  kind. 
To  Ascham  it  seemed  like  "the  enchantment  of  Circ« 
brought  out  of  Italy  to  mar  men's  manners  in  England." 
"  An  Italianate  Englishman,"  ran  the  harder  proverb  of 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540-1606.  459 

Italy  itself,  "is  an  incarnate  devil."  The  literary  form 
which  this  imitation  took  seemed  at  any  rate  ridiculous. 
John  Lyle,  distinguished  both  as  a  dramatist  and  a  poet, 
laid  aside  the  tradition  of  English  style  for  a  style  modelled 
on  the  decadence  of  Italian  prose.  Euphuism,  as  the  new 
fashion  has  been  named  from  the  prose  romance  of  Euphues 
which  Lyle  published  in  1579,  is  best  known  to  modern 
readers  by  the  pitiless  caricature  in  which  Shakspere 
quizzed  its  pedantry,  its  affection,  the  meaningless  monot- 
ony of  its  far-fetched  phrases,  the  absurdity  of  its  extrava- 
gant conceits.  Its  representative,  Armado  in  "Love's 
Labor's  Lost,"  is  "a  man  of  fire-new  words,  fashion's  own 
knight,"  "that  hath  a  mint  of  phrases  in  his  brain;  one 
whom  the  music  of  his  own  vain  tongue  doth  ravish  like 
enchanting  harmony."  But  its  very  extravagance  sprang 
from  the  general  burst  of  delight  in  the  new  resources  of 
thought  and  language  which  literature  felt  to  be  at  its  dis- 
posal ;  and  the  new  sense  of  literary  beauty  which  it  dis- 
closed in  its  affectation,  in  its  love  of  a  "mint  of  phrases," 
and  the  "music  of  its  ever  vain  tongue,"  the  new  sense  of 
pleasure  which  it  revealed  in  delicacy  or  grandeur  of  ex- 
pression, in  the  structure  and  arrangement  of  sentences,  in 
what  has  been  termed  the  atmosphere  of  words,  was  a 
sense  out  of  which  style  was  itself  to  spring. 

For  a  time  Euphuism  had  it  all  its  own  way.  Elizabeth 
was  the  most  affected  and  detestable  of  Euphuists;  and 
"that  beauty  in  Court  which  could  not  parley  Euphuism," 
a  courtier  of  Charles  the  First's  time  tells  us,  "was  as 
little  regarded  as  she  that  now  there  speaks  not  French." 
The  fashion  however  passed  away,  but  the  "  Arcadia"  of 
Sir  Philip  Sidney  shows  the  wonderful  advance  which 
prose  had  made  under  its  influence.  Sidney,  the  nephew 
of  Lord  Leicester,  was  the  idol  of  his  time,  and  perhaps 
no  figure  reflects  the  age  more  fully  and  more  beautifully. 
Fair  as  he  was  brave,  quick  of  wit  as  of  affection,  noble 
and  generous  in  temper,  dear  to  Elizabeth  as  to  Spenser, 
the  darling  of  the  Court  and  of  the  camp,  his  learning  and 


460  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

his  genius  made  him  the  centre  of  the  literary  world  which 
was  springing  into  birth  on  English  soil.  He  had  trav- 
elled in  France  and  Italy,  he  was  master  alike  of  the  older 
learning  and  of  the  new  discoveries  of  astronomy.  Bruno 
dedicated  to  him  as  to  a  friend  his  metaphysical  specula- 
tions ;  he  was  familiar  with  the  drama  of  Spain,  the  poems 
of  Ronsard,  the  sonnets  of  Italy.  Sidney  combined  the 
wisdom  of  a  grave  councillor  with  the  romantic  chivalry 
of  a  knight-errant.  "  I  never  heard  the  old  story  of  Percy 
and  Douglas,"  he  says,  "that  I  found  not  my  heart  moved 
more  than  with  a  trumpet."  He  flung  away  his  life  to 
save  the  English  army  in  Flanders,  and  as  he  lay  dying 
they  brought  a  cup  of  water  to  his  fevered  lips.  He  bade 
them  give  it  to  a  soldier  who  was  stretched  on  the  ground 
beside  him.  "Thy  necessity,"  he  said,  "is  greater  than 
mine."  The  whole  of  Sidney's  nature,  his  chivalry  and 
his  learning,  his  thirst  for  adventures,  his  freshness  of 
tone,  his  tenderness  and  childlike  simplicity  of  heart,  his 
affectation  and  false  sentiment,  his  keen  sense  of  pleasure 
and  delight,  pours  itself  out  in  the  pastoral  medley,  forced, 
tedious,  and  yet  strangely  beautiful,  of  his  "  Arcadia. "  In 
his  "  Defence  of  Poetry"  the  youthful  exuberance  of  the 
romancer  has  passed  into  the  earnest  vigor  and  grandiose 
stateliness  of  the  rhetorician.  But  whether  in  the  one 
work  or  the  other,  the  flexibility,  the  music,  the  luminous 
clearness  of  Sidney's  style  remains  the  same. 

But  the  quickness  and  vivacity  of  English  prose  was 
first  developed  in  a  school  of  Italian  imitators  which  ap- 
peared in  Elizabeth's  later  years.  The  origin  of  English 
fiction  is  to  be  found  in  the  tales  and  romances  with  which 
Greene  and  Nash  crowded  the  market,  models  for  which 
they  found  in  the  Italian  novels.  The  brief  form  of  these 
novelettes  soon  led  to  the  appearance  of  the  "  pamphlet ;" 
and  a  new  world  of  readers  was  seen  in  the  rapidity  with 
which  the  stories  or  scurrilous  libels  that  passed  under  this 
name  were  issued,  and  the  greediness  with  which  they 
were  devoured.  It  was  the  boast  of  Greene  that  in  the 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  461 

eight  years  before  his  death  he  had  produced  forty  pam- 
phlets. "  In  a  night  or  a  day  would  he  have  yarked  up  a 
pamphlet,  as  well  as  in  seven  years,  and  glad  was  that 
printer  that  might  be  blest  to  pay  him  dear  for  the  very 
dregs  of  his  wit."  Modern  eyes  see  less  of  the  wit  than  of 
the  dregs  in  the  books  of  Greene  and  his  compeers ;  but 
the  attacks  which  Nash  directed  against  the  Puritans  and 
his  rivals  were  the  first  English  works  which  shook  utterly 
off  the  pedantry  and  extravagance  of  Euphuism.  In  his 
lightness,  his  facility,  his  vivacity,  his  directness  of  speech, 
we  have  the  beginning  of  popular  literature.  It  had  de- 
scended from  the  closet  to  the  street,  and  the  very  change 
implied  that  the  street  was  ready  to  receive  it.  The  abun- 
dance indeed  of  printers  and  of  printed  books  at  the  close  of 
the  Queen's  reign  shows  that  the  world  of  readers  and 
writers  had  widened  far  beyond  the  small  circle  of  scholars 
and  courtiers  with  which  it  began. 

But  to  the  national  and  local  influences  which  were  tell- 
ing on  English  literature  was  added  that  of  the  restlessness 
and  curiosity  which  characterized  the  age.  At  the  moment 
which  we  have  reached  the  sphere  of  human  interest  was 
widened  as  it  has  never  been  widened  before  or  since  by 
the  revelation  of  a  new  heaven  and  a  new  earth.  It  was 
only  in  the  later  years  of  the  sixteenth  century  that  the 
discoveries  of  Copernicus  were  brought  home  to  the  gen- 
eral intelligence  of  mankind  by  Kepler  and  Galileo,  or  that 
the  daring  of  the  Buccaneers  broke  through  the  veil  which 
greed  of  Spain  had  drawn  across  the  New  World  of 
Columbus.  Hardly  inferior  to  these  revelations  as  a 
source  of  intellectual  impulse  was  the  sudden  and  pictur- 
esque way  in  which  the  various  races  of  the  world  were 
brought  face  to  face  with  one  another  through  the  uni- 
versal passion  for  foreign  travel.  While  the  red  tribes  of 
the  West  were  described  by  Amerigo  Vespucci,  and  the 
strange  civilization  of  Mexico  and  Peru  disclosed  by  Cortes 
and  Pizarro,  the  voyages  of  the  Portuguese  threw  open  the 
older  splendors  of  the  East,  and  the  story  of  India  and 


463  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boos  VI. 

China  was  told  for  the  first  time  to  Christendom  by  Maffei 
and  Mendoza.  England  took  her  full  part  in  this  work  of 
discovery.  Jenkinson,  an  English  traveller,  made  his  way 
to  Bokhara.  Willoughby  brought  back  Muscovy  to  the 
knowledge  of  Western  Europe.  English  mariners  pene- 
trated among  the  Esquimaux,  or  settled  in  Virginia. 
Drake  circumnavigated  the  globe.  The  "Collection  of 
Voyages"  which  was  published  by  Hakluyt  in  1582  dis- 
closed the  vastness  of  the  world  itself,  the  infinite  number 
of  the  races  of  mankind,  the  variety  of  their  laws,  their 
customs,  their  religions,  their  very  instincts.  We  see  the 
influence  of  this  new  and  wider  knowledge  of  the  world, 
not  only  in  the  life  and  richness  which  it  gave  to  the  im- 
agination of  the  time,  but  in  the  immense  interest  which 
from  this  moment  attached  itself  to  Man.  Shakspere's 
conception  of  Caliban,  like  the  questioning  of  Montaigne, 
marks  the  beginning  of  a  new  and  a  truer,  because  a  more 
inductive,  philosophy  of  human  nature  and  human  history. 
The  fascination  exercised  by  the  study  of  human  character 
showed  itself  in  the  essays  of  Bacon,  and  yet  more  in  the 
wonderful  popularity  of  the  drama. 

And  to  these  larger  and  world-wide  sources  of  poetic 
power  was  added  in  England,  at  the  moment  which  we 
have  reached  in  its  story,  the  impulse  which  sprang  from 
national  triumph,  from  the  victory  over  the  Armada,  the 
deliverance  from  Spain,  the  rolling  away  of  the  Catholic 
terror  which  had  hung  like  a  cloud  over  the  hopes  of  the 
new  people.  With  its  new  sense  of  security,  its  new  sense 
of  national  energy  and  national  power,  the  whole  aspect  of 
England  suddenly  changed.  As  yet  the  interest  of  Eliza- 
beth's reign  had  been  political  and  material;  the  stage  had 
been  crowded  with  statesmen  and  warriors,  with  Cecils  and 
Walsinghams  and  Drakes.  Literature  had  hardly  found 
a  place  in  the  glories  of  the  time.  But  from  the  moment 
when  the  Armada  drifted  back  broken  to  Ferrol  the  figures 
of  warriors  and  statesmen  were  dwarfed  by  the  grander 
figures  of  poets  and  philosophers.  Amid  the  throng  in 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1603.  463 

Elizabeth's  antechamber  the  noblest  form  is  that  of  the 
singer  who  lays  the  "  Faerie  Queen"  at  her  feet,  or  of  the 
young  lawyer  who  muses  amid  the  splendors  of  the  pres- 
ence over  the  problems  of  the  "Novum  Organum."  The 
triumph  at  Cadiz,  the  conquest  of  Ireland,  pass  unheeded 
as  we  watch  Hooker  building  up  his  "  Ecclesiastical  Polity" 
among  the  sheepfolds,  or  the  genius  of  Shakspere  rising 
year  by  year  into  supremer  grandeur  in  a  rude  theatre  be- 
side the  Thames. 

The  glory  of  the  new  literature  broke  on  England  with 
Edmund  Spenser.  We  know  little  of  his  life ;  he  was  born 
in  1552  in  East  London,  the  son  of  poor  parents,  but  linked 
in  blood  with  the  Spencers  of  Althorpe,  even  then — as  he 
proudly  says — "  a  house  of  ancient  fame. "  He  studied  as 
a  sizar  at  Cambridge,  and  quitted  the  University  while 
still  a  boy  to  live  as  a  tutor  in  the  north ;  but  after  some 
years  of  obscure  poverty  the  scorn  of  a  fair  "  Rosalind" 
drove  him  again  southward.  A  college  friendship  with 
Gabriel  Harvey  served  to  introduce  him  to  Lord  Leicester, 
who  sent  him  as  his  envoy  into  France,  and  in  whose  ser- 
vice he  first  became  acquainted  with  Leicester's  nephew, 
Sir  Philip  Sidney.  From  Sidney's  house  at  Penshurst 
came  in  1579  his  earliest  work,  the  "  Shepherd's  Calendar ;" 
in  form,  like  Sidney's  own  "Arcadia,"  a  pastoral  where 
love  and  loyalty  and  Puritanism  jostled  oddly  with  the 
fancied  shepherd  life.  The  peculiar  melody  and  profuse 
imagination  which  the  pastoral  disclosed  at  once  placed  its 
.author  in  the  forefront  of  living  poets,  but  a  far  greater 
'work  was  already  in  hand;  and  from  some  words  of 
Gabriel  Harvey's  we  see  Spenser  bent  on  rivalling  Ariosto, 
and  even  hoping  "  to  overgo"  the  "  Orlando  Furioso"  in 
his  "Elvish  Queen."  The  ill-will  or  the  indifference  of 
Burleigh  however  blasted  the  expectations  he  had  drawn 
from  the  patronage  of  Sidney  of  Leicester,  and  from  the 
favor^with  which  he  had  been  welcomed  by  the  Queen. 
Sidney,  in  disgrace  with  Elizabeth  through  his  opposition 
to  the  marriage  with  Anjou,  withdrew  to  Wilton  to  write 


464  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

the  "Arcadia"  by  his  sister's  side;  and  "discontent  of  my 
long  fruitless  stay  in  princes'  courts,"  the  poet  tells  us, 
"  and  expectation  vain  of  idle  hopes"  drove  Spenser  into 
exile.  In  1580  he  followed  Lord  Grey  as  his  secretary 
into  Ireland  and  remained  there  on  the  Deputy's  recall  in 
the  enjoyment  of  an  office  and  a  grant  of  land  from  the 
forfeited  estates  of  the  Earl  of  Desmond.  Spenser  had 
thus  enrolled  himself  among  the  colonists  to  whom  Eng- 
land was  looking  at  the  time  for  the  regeneration  of  Mun- 
ster,  and  the  practical  interest  he  took  in  the  "  barren  soil 
where  cold  and  want  and  poverty  do  grow"  was  shown  by 
the  later  publication  of  a  prose  tractate  on  the  condition 
and  government  of  the  island.  It  was  at  Dublin  or  in  his 
castle  of  Kilcolman,  two  miles  from  Doneraile,  "  under  the 
foot  of  Mole,  that  mountain  hoar,"  that  he  spent  the  ten 
years  in  which  Sidney  died  and  Mary  fell  on  the  scaffold 
and  the  Armada  came  and  went ;  and  it  was  in  the  latter 
home  that  Walter  Raleigh  found  him  sitting  "  alwaies  idle, " 
a8  it  seemed  to  his  restless  friend,  "  among  the  cooly  shades 
of  the  green  alders  by  the  Mulla's  shore"  in  a  visit  made 
memorable  by  the  poem  of  "Colin  Clout's  come  home 
again." 

But  in  the  "  idlesse"  and  solitude  of  the  poet's  exile  the 
great  work  begun  in  the  two  pleasant  years  of  his  stay  at 
Penshurst  had  at  last  taken  form,  and  it  was  to  publish  the 
first  three  books  of  the  "  Faerie  Queen"  that  Spenser  re- 
turned in  Raleigh's  company  to  London.  The  appearance 
of  the  u  Faerie  Queen"  in  1590  is  the  one  critical  event  in 
the  annals  of  English  poetry ;  it  settled  in  fact  the  question 
whether  there  was  to  be  such  a  thing  as  English  poetry  or 
no.  The  older  national  verse  which  had  blossomed  and 
died  in  Caedmon  sprang  suddenly  into  a  grander  life  in 
Chaucer,  but  it  closed  again  in  a  yet  more  complete  death. 
Across  the  Border  indeed  the  Scotch  poets  of  the  fifteenth 
century  preserved  something  of  their  master's  vivacity 
and  color,  and  in  England  itself  the  Italian  poetry  of  the 
Renascence  had  of  late  found  echoes  in  Surrey  and  Sidney. 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  46* 

The  new  English  drama  too  was  beginning  to  display  ite 
wonderful  powers,  and  the  work  of  Marlowe  had  already 
prepared  the  way  for  the  work  of  Shakspere.  But  bright 
as  was  the  promise  of  coming  song,  no  great  imaginative 
jpoem  had  broken  the  silence  of  English  literature  for  nearly 
two  hundred  years  when  Spenser  landed  at  Bristol  with 
the  "Faerie  Queen."  From  that  moment  the  stream  of 
English  poetry  has  flowed  on  without  a  break.  There 
have  been  times,  as  in  the  years  which  immediately  fol- 
lowed, when  England  has  "  become  a  nest  of  singing  birds ;" 
there  have  been  times  when  song  was  scant  and  poor ;  but 
there  never  has  been  a  time  when  England  was  wholly 
without  a  singer. 

The  new  English  verse  has  been  true  to  the  source  from 
which  it  sprang,  and  Spenser  has  always  been  "  the  poet's 
poet."  But  in  his  own  day  he  was  the  poet  of  England 
at  large.  The  "  Faerie  Queen"  was  received  with  a  burst 
of  general  welcome.  It  became  "  the  delight  of  every  ac- 
complished gentleman,  the  model  of  every  poet,  the  solace 
of  every  soldier."  The  poem  expressed  indeed  the  very 
life  of  the  time.  It  was  with  a  true  poetic  instinct  that 
Spenser  fell  back  for  the  framework  of  his  story  on  the 
fairy  world  of  Celtic  romance,  whose  wonder  and  mystery 
had  in  fact  become  the  truest  picture  of  the  wonder  and 
mystery  of  the  world  around  him.  In  the  age  of  Cortes 
and  of  Raleigh  dreamland  had  ceased  to  be  dreamland,  and 
no  marvel  or  adventure  that  befell  lady  or  knight  was 
stranger  than  the  tales  which  weatherbeaten  mariners 
from  the  Southern  Seas  were  telling  every  day  to  grave 
merchants  upon  'Change.  The  very  incongruities  of  the 
story  of  Arthur  and  his  knighthood,  strangely  as  it  had  been 
built  up  out  of  the  rival  efforts  of  bard  and  jongleur  and 
priest,  made  it  the  fittest  vehicle  for  the  expression  of  the 
world  of  incongruous  feeling  which  we  call  the  Renascence. 
To  modern  eyes  perhaps  there  is  something  grotesque 
in  the  strange  medley  of  figures  that  crowd  the  canvas 
of  the  "Faerie  Queen,"  in  its  fauns  dancing  on  the  sward 


466  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

where  knights  have  hurtled  together,  in  its  alternation  of 
the  savage  men  from  the  New  World  with  the  satyrs  of 
classic  mythology,  in  the  giants,  dwarfs,  and  monsters  of 
popular  fancy  who  jostle  with  the  nymphs  of  Greek  legend 
and  the  damosels  of  mediaeval  romance.  But,  strange  as 
the  medley  is,  it  reflects  truly  enough  the  stranger  medley 
of  warring  ideals  and  irreconcilable  impulses  which  made 
up  the  life  of  Spenser's  contemporaries.  It  was  not  in  the 
u  Faerie  Queen"  only,  but  in  the  world  which  it  portrayed, 
that  the  religious  mysticism  of  the  Middle  Ages  stood  face 
to  face  with  the  intellectual  freedom  of  the  Revival  of  Let- 
ters, that  asceticism  and  self-denial  cast  their  spell  on  im- 
aginations glowing  with  the  sense  of  varied  and  inexhaus- 
tible existence,  that  the  dreamy  and  poetic  refinement  of 
feeling  which  expressed  itself  in  the  fanciful  unrealities  of 
chivalry  co-existed  with  the  rough  practical  energy  that 
sprang  from  an  awakening  sense  of  human  power,  or  the 
lawless  extravagance  of  an  idealized  friendship  and  love 
lived  side  by  side  with  the  moral  sternness  and  elevation 
which  England  was  drawing  from  the  Reformation  and 
the  Bible. 

But  strangely  contrasted  as  are  the  elements  of  the  poem, 
they  are  harmonized  by  the  calmness  and  serenity  which 
is  the  note  of  the  " Faerie  Queen."  The  world  of  the  Re- 
nascence is  around  us,  but  it  is  ordered,  refined,  and  calmed 
by  the  poet's  touch.  The  warmest  scenes  which  he  bor- 
rows from  the  Italian  verse  of  his  day  are  idealized  into 
purity ;  the  very  struggle  of  the  men  around  him  is  lifted 
out  of  its  pettier  accidents  and  raised  into  a  spiritual  one- 
ness with  the  struggle  in  the  soul  itself.  There  are  allu- 
sions in  plenty  to  contemporary  events,  but  the  contest  be- 
tween Elizabeth  and  Mary  takes  ideal  form  in  that  of  Una 
and.  the  false  Duessa,  and  the  clash  of  arms  between  Spain 
and  the  Huguenots  comes  to  us  faint  and  hushed  through 
the  serene  air.  The  verse,  like  the  story,  rolli  on  as  by  its 
own  natural  power,  without  haste  or  effort  or  delay,  Th« 
gorgeous  coloring,  the  profuse  and  often  complex  imagery 


CHAP.  7.]          THE  REFORMATION.    1540-1608.  467 

which  Spenser's  imagination  lavishes,  leave  no  sense  of 
confusion  in  the  reader's  mind.  Every  figure,  strange  as 
it  may  be,  is  seen  clearly  and  distinctly  as  it  passes  by. 
It  is  in  this  calmness,  this  serenity,  this  spiritual  elevation 
of  the  "Faerie  Queen,"  that  we  feel  the  new  life  of  the 
coming  age  moulding  into  ordered  and  harmonious  form 
the  life  of  the  Renascence.  Both  in  its  conception,  and  in 
the  way  in  which  this  conception  is  realized  in  the  portion 
of  his  work  which  Spenser  completed,  his  poem  strikes  the 
note  of  the  coming  Puritanism.  In  his  earlier  pastoral, 
the  "Shepherd's  Calendar,"  the  poet  had  boldly  taken  his 
part  with  the  more  advanced  reformers  against  the  Church 
policy  of  the  Court.  He  had  chosen  Archbishop  Grindal, 
who  was  then  in  disgrace  for  his  Puritan  sympathies,  as 
his  model  of  a  Christian  pastor ;  and  attacked  with  sharp 
invective  the  pomp  of  the  higher  clergy.  His  "Faerie 
Queen"  in  its  religious  theory  is  Puritan  to  the  core.  The 
worst  foe  of  its  "  Red-cross  Knight"  is  the  false  and  scarlet- 
clad  Duessa  of  Rome,  who  parts  him  for  a  while  from 
Truth  and  leads  him  to  the  house  of  Ignorance.  Speuser 
presses  strongly  and  pitilessly  for  the  execution  of  Mary 
Stuart.  No  bitter  word  ever  breaks  the  calm  of  his  verse 
save  when  it  touches  on  the  perils  with  which  Catholicism 
was  environing  England,  perils  before  which  his  knight 
must  fall  "  were  not  that  Heavenly  Grace  doth  him  uphold 
and  steadfast  Truth  acquite  him  out  of  all."  But  it  is  yet 
more  in  the  temper  and  aim  of  his  work  that  we  catch  the 
nobler  and  deeper  tones  of  English  Puritanism.  In  his 
earlier  musings  at  Penshurst  the  poet  had  purposed  to  sur- 
pass Ariosto,  but  the  gayety  of  Ariesto's  song  is  utterly 
absent  from  his  own.  Not  a  ripple  of  laughter  breaks  the 
calm  surface  of  Spenser's  verse.  He  is  habitually  serious, 
and  the  seriousness  of  his  poetic  tone  reflects  the  serious- 
ness of  his  poetic  purpose.  His  aim,  he  tells  us,  was  to 
represent  the  moral  virtues,  to  assign  to  each  its  knightly 
patron,  so  that  its  excellence  might  be  expressed  and  it» 
contrary  vice  trodden  under  foot  by  deeds  of  arms  and 


468  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

chivalry.  In  knight  after  knight  of  the  twelve  he  pur- 
posed to  paint,  he  wished  to  embody  some  single  virtue  of 
the  virtuous  man  in  its  struggle  with  the  faults  and  errors 
which  specially  beset  it;  till  in  Arthur,  the  sum  of  the 
whole  company,  man  might  have  been  seen  perfected,  in 
his  longing  and  progress  toward  the  "Faerie  Queen,"  the 
jDivine  Glory  which  is  the  true  end  of  human  effort. 

The  largeness  of  his  culture  indeed,  his  exquisite  sense 
of  beauty,  and  above  all  the  very  intensity  of  his  moral 
enthusiasm,  saved  Spenser  from  the  narrowness  and  exag- 
geration which  often  distorted  goodness  into  unloveliness 
in  the  Puritan.  Christian  as  he  is  to  the  core,  his  Chris- 
tianity is  enriched  and  fertilized  by  the  larger  temper  of 
the  Renascence,  as  well  as  by  a  poet's  love  of  the  natural 
world  in  which  the  older  mythologies  struck  their  roots. 
Diana  and  the  gods  of  heathendom  take  a  sacred  tinge 
from  the  purer  sanctities  of  the  new  faith ;  and  in  one  of 
the  greatest  songs  of  the  "  Faerie  Queen"  the  conception  of 
love  widens,  as  it  widened  in  the  mind  of  a  Greek,  into  the 
mighty  thought  of  the  productive  energy  of  Nature. 
Spenser  borrows  in  fact  the  delicate  and  refined  forms  of 
the  Platonist  philosophy  to  express  his  own  moral  enthu- 
siasm. Not  only  does  he  love,  as  others  have  loved,  all 
that  is  noble  and  pure  and  of  good  report,  but  he  is  fired  as 
none  before  or  after  him  have  been  fired  with  a  passionate 
sense  of  moral  beauty.  Justice,  Temperance,  Truth,  are 
no  mere  names  to  him,  but  real  existences  to  which  his 
whole  nature  clings  with  a  rapturous  affection.  Outer 
beauty  he  believed  to  spring,  and  loved  because  it  sprang 
from  the  beauty  of  the  soul  within.  There  was  much  in 
such  a  moral  protest  as  this  to  rouse  dislike  in  any  age, 
but  it  is  the  glory  of  the  age  of  Elizabeth  that,  "  mad  world" 
as  in  many  ways  it  was,  all  that  was  noble  welcomed  the 
"Faerie  Queen."  Elizabeth  herself,  says  Spenser,  "to 
mine  oaten  pipe  inclined  her  ear,"  and  bestowed  a  pension 
on  the  poet.  In  1595  he  brought  three  more  books  of  hia 
poem  to  England.  He  returned  to  Ireland  to  commemo- 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  4S9 

rate  his  marriage  in  Sonnets  and  the  most  beautiful  of 
bridal  songs,  and  to  complete  the  "  Faerie  Queen"  among 
love  and  poverty  and  troubles  from  his  Irish  neighbors. 
But  these  troubles  soon  took  a  graver  form.  In  1599  Ire- 
land broke  into  revolt,  and  the  poet  escaped  from  his  burn- 
ing house  to  fly  to  England  and  to  die  broken-hearted  in 
an  inn  at  Westminster. 

If  the  "  Faerie  Queen"  expressed  the  higher  elements  of 
the  Elizabethan  age,  the  whole  of  that  age,  its  lower  ele- 
ments and  its  higher  alike,  was  expressed  in  the  English 
drama.  We  have  already  pointed  out  the  circumstances 
which  throughout  Europe  were  giving  a  poetic  impulse  to 
the  newly-aroused  intelligence  of  men,  and  this  impulse 
everywhere  took  a  dramatic  shape.  The  artificial  French 
tragedy  which  began  about  his  time  with  Garnier  was  not 
indeed  destined  to  exert  any  influence  over  English  poetry 
till  a  later  age ;  but  the  influence  of  the  Italian  comedy, 
which  had  begun  half  a  century  earlier  with  Machiavelli 
and  Ariosto,  was  felt  directly  through  the  Novelle,  or 
stories,  which  served  as  plots  for  our  dramatists.  It  left 
its  stamp  indeed  on  some  of  the  worst  characteristics  of 
the  English  stage.  The  features  of  our  drama  that  startled 
the  moral  temper  of  the  time  and  won  the  deadly  hatred  of 
the  Puritans,  its  grossness  and  profanity,  its  tendency  to 
scenes  of  horror  and  crime,  its  profuse  employment  of 
cruelty  and  lust  as  grounds  of  dramatic  action,  its  daring 
use  of  the  horrible  and  the  unnatural  whenever  they  en- 
abled it  to  display  the  more  terrible  and  revolting  sides  of 
human  passion,  were  derived  from  the  Italian  stage.  It 
is  doubtful  how  much  the  English  playwrights  may  have 
owed  to  the  Spanish  drama,  which  under  Lope  and  Cer- 
vantes sprang  suddenly  into  a  grandeur  that  almost 
rivalled  their  own.  In  the  intermixture  of  tragedy  and 
comedy,  in  the  abandonment  of  the  solemn  uniformity  of 
poetic  diction  for  the  colloquial  language  of  real  life,  the 
use  of  unexpected  incidents,  the  complication  of  their  plots 
and  intrigues,  the  dramas  of  England  and  Spain  are  re- 


470  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

markably  alike;  but  the  likeness  seems  rather  to  have 
sprung  from  a  similarity  in  the  circumstances  to  which 
both  owed  their  rise,  than  to  any  direct  connection  of  the 
one  with  the  other.  The  real  origin  of  the  English  drama, 
in  fact,  lay  not  in  any  influence  from  without  but  in  the 
influence  of  England  itself.  The  temper  of  the  nation  was 
dramatic.  Ever  since  the  Reformation,  the  Palace,  the 
Inns  of  Court,  and  the  University  had  been  vying  with 
one  another  in  the  production  of  plays;  and  so  early  was 
their  popularity  that  even  under  Henry  the  Eighth  it  was 
found  necessary  to  create  a  "  Master  of  the  Revels"  to  super- 
vise them.  Every  progress  of  Elizabeth  from  shire  to  shire 
was  a  succession  of  shows  and  interludes.  Diana  with  her 
nymphs  met  the  Queen  as  she  returned  from  hunting; 
Love  presented  her  with  his  golden  arrow  as  she  passed 
through  the  gates  of  Norwich.  From  the  earlier  years  of 
her  reign  the  new  spirit  of  the  Renascence  had  been  pour- 
ing itself  into  the  rough  mould  of  the  Mystery  Plays, 
whose  allegorical  virtues  and  vices,  or  scriptural  heroes 
and  heroines,  had  handed  on  the  spirit  of  the  drama 
through  the  Middle  Ages.  Adaptations  from  classical 
pieces  began  to  alternate  with  the  purely  religious  "  Moral- 
ities;" and  an  attempt  at  a  livelier  style  of  expression  and 
invention  appeared  in  the  popular  comedy  of  "  Gammar 
Gurton's  Needle;"  while  Sackville,  Lord  Dorset,  in  his 
tragedy  of  "  Gorboduc"  made  a  bold  effort  at  sublimity  of 
diction,  and  introduced  the  use  of  blank  verse  as  the  vehicle 
of  dramatic  dialogue. 

But  it  was  not  to  these  tentative  efforts  of  scholars  and 
nobles  that  the  English  stage  was  really  indebted  for  the 
amazing  outburst  of  genius  which  dates  from  the  year 
1576,  when  "the  Earl  of  Leicester's  servants"  erected  the 
first  public  theatre  in  Blackfriars.  It  was  the  people  it- 
self that  created  its  Stage.  The  theatre  indeed  was  com- 
monly only  the  courtyard  of  an  inn,  or  a  mere  booth  such 
as  is  still  seen  at  a  country  fair.  The  bulk  of  the  audience 
sat  beneath  the  open  sky  in  the  "pit"  or  yard;  a  few 


CHAP.  7.]          THE  REFORMATION.    1540-1608.  471 

covered  seats  in  the  galleries  which  ran  round  it  formed 
the  boxes  of  the  wealthier  spectators,  while  patrons  and 
nobles  found  seats  upon  the  actual  boards.  All  the  appli- 
ances were  of  the  roughest  sort :  a  few  flowers  served  to 
indicate  a  garden,  crowds  and  armies  were  represented  by 
a  dozen  scene-shifters  with  swords  and  bucklers,  heroes 
rode  in  and  out  on  hobby-horses,  and  a  scroll  on  a  post  told 
whether  the  scene  was  at  Athens  or  London.  There  were 
no  female  actors,  and  the  grossness  which  startles  us  in 
words  which  fell  from  women's  lips  took  a  different  color 
when  every  woman's  part  was  acted  by  a  boy.  But  dif- 
ficulties such  as  these  were  more  than  compensated  by  the 
popular  character  of  the  drama  itself.  Rude  as  the  theatre 
might  be,  all  the  world  was  there.  The  stage  was  crowded 
with  nobles  and  courtiers.  Apprentices  and  citizens 
thronged  the  benches  in  the  yard  below.  The  rough  mob 
of  the  pit  inspired,  as  it  felt,  the  vigorous  life,  the  rapid 
transitions,  the  passionate  energy,  the  reality,  the  lifelike 
medley  and  confusion,  the  racy  dialogue,  the  chat,  the 
wit,  the  pathos,  the  sublimity,  the  rant  and  buffoonery, 
the  coarse  horrors  and  vulgar  bloodshedding,  the  immense 
range  over  all  classes  of  society,  the  intimacy  with  the 
foulest  as  well  as  the  fairest  developments  of  human  temper, 
which  characterized  the  English  stage.  The  new  drama 
represented  "  the  very  age  and  body  of  the  time,  his  form 
and  pressure."  The  people  itself  brought  its  nobleness  and 
its  vileness  to  the  boards.  No  stage  was  ever  so  human, 
no  poetic  life  so  intense.  Wild,  reckless,  defiant  of  all 
past  tradition,  of  all  conventional  laws,  the  English  dram- 
atists owned  no  teacher,  no  source  of  poetic  inspiration, 
but  the  people  itself. 

Few  events  in  our  literary  history  are  so  startling  as  this 
sudden  rise  of  the  Elizabethan  drama.  The  first  public 
theatre  was  erected  only  in  the  middle  of  the  Queen's 
reign.  Before  the  close  of  it  eighteen  theatres  existed  in 
London  alone.  Fifty  dramatic  poets,  many  of  the  first 
order,  appeared  in  the  fifty  years  which  preceded  the  clos- 


472  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI. 

ing  of  the  theatres  by  the  Puritans ;  and  great  as  is  the 
number  of  their  works  which  have  perished,  we  still  possess 
a  hundred  dramas,  all  written  within  this  period,  and  of 
which  at  least  a  half  are  excellent.  A  glance  at  their 
authors  shows  us  that  the  intellectual  quickening  of  the 
age  had  now  reached  the  mass  of  the  people.  Almost  all 
of  the  new  playwrights  were  fairly  educated,  and  many 
were  university  men.  But  instead  of  courtly  singers  of 
the  Sidney  and  Spenser  sort  we  see  the  advent  of  the  "  poor 
scholar."  The  earlier  dramatists,  such  as  Nash,  Peele, 
Kyd,  Greene,  or  Marlowe,  were  for  the  most  part  poor, 
and  reckless  in  their  poverty ;  wild  livers,  defiant  of  law 
or  common  fame,  in  revolt  against  the  usages  and  religion 
of  their  day,  "  atheists"  in  general  repute,  "  holding  Moses 
for  a  juggler,"  haunting  the  brothel  and  the  alehouse,  and 
dying  starved  or  in  tavern  brawls.  But  with  their  appear- 
ance began  the  Elizabethan  drama.  The  few  plays  which 
have  reached  us  of  an  earlier  date  are  either  cold  imita- 
tions of  the  classical  and  Italian  comedy,  or  rude  farces 
like  "Ralph  Roister  Doister,"  or  tragedies  such  as  "Gor- 
buduc"  where,  poetic  as  occasional  passages  may  be,  there 
is  little  promise  of  dramatic  development.  But  in  the  year 
which  preceded  the  coming  of  the  Armada  the  whole  aspect 
of  the  stage  suddenly  changes,  and  the  new  dramatists 
range  themselves  around  two  men  of  very  different  genius, 
Robert  Greene  and  Christopher  Marlowe. 

Of  Greene,  as  the  creator  of  our  lighter  English  prose, 
we  have  already  spoken.  But  his  work  as  a  poet  was  of 
yet  greater  importance,  for  his  perception  of  character  and 
the  relations  of  social  life,  the  playfulness  of  his  fancy,  and. 
the  liveliness  of  his  style,  exerted  an  influence  on  his  con- 
temporaries which  was  equalled  by  that  of  none  but  Mar^ 
lowe  and  Peele.  In  spite  of  the  rudeness  of  his  plots  and 
the  unequal  character  of  his  work  Greene  must  be  regarded 
as  the  creator  of  our  modern  comedy.  No  figure  better 
paints  the  group  of  young  playwrights.  He  left  Cam- 
bridge to  travel  through  Italy  and  Spain,  and  to  bring 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  473 

back  the  debauchery  of  the  one  and  the  scepticism  of  the 
other.  In  the  words  of  remorse  he  wrote  before  his  death 
he  paints  himself  as  a  drunkard  and  a  roysterer,  winning 
money  only  by  ceaseless  pamphlets  and  plays  to  waste  it 
on  wine  and  women,  and  drinking  the  cup  of  life  to  the 
dregs.  Hell  and  the  after-world  were  the  butts  of  his 
ceaseless  mockery.  If  he  had  not  feared  the  judges  of  the 
Queen's  Courts  more  than  he  feared  God,  he  said  in  bitter 
jest,  he  should  often  have  turned  cutpurse.  He  married, 
and  loved  his  wife,  but  she  was  soon  deserted;  and  the 
wretched  profligate  found  himself  again  plunged  into  ex- 
cesses which  he  loathed,  though  he  could  not  live  without 
them.  But  wild  as  was  the  life  of  Greene,  his  pen  was 
pure.  He  is  steadily  on  virtue's  side  in  the  love  pam- 
phlets and  novelettes  he  poured  out  in  endless  succession, 
and  whose  plots  were  dramatized  by  the  school  which 
gathered  round  him. 

The  life  of  Marlowe  was  as  riotous,  his  scepticism  even 
more  daring,  than  the  life  and  scepticism  of  Greene.  His 
early  death  alone  saved  him  in  all  probability  from  a  pros- 
ecution for  atheism.  He  was  charged  with  calling  Moses 
a  juggler,  and  with  boasting  that,  if  he  undertook  to  write 
a  new  religion,  it  should  be  a  better  religion  than  the 
Christianity  he  saw  around  him.  But  he  stood  far  ahead 
of  his  fellows  as  a  creator  of  English  tragedy.  Born  in 
1564  at  the  opening  of  Elizabeth's  reign,  the  son  of  a 
Canterbury  shoemaker,  but  educated  at  Cambridge,  Mar- 
lowe burst  on  the  world  in  the  year  which  preceded  the 
triumph  over  the  Armada  with  a  play  which  at  once 
wrought  a  revolution  in  the  English  stage.  Bombastic 
and  extravagant  as  it  was,  and  extravagance  reached  its 
height  in  a  scene  where  captive  kings,  the  "pampered 
jades  of  Asia,"  drew  their  conqueror's  car  across  the  stage, 
"  Tamburlaine"  not  only  indicated  the  revolt  of  the  new 
drama  against  the  timid  inanities  of  Euphuism,  but  gave 
an  earnest  of  that  imaginative  daring,  the  secret  of  which 
Marlowe  was  to  bequeath  to  the  playwrights  who  followed 


474  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

him.  He  perished  at  thirty  in  a  shameful  brawl,  but  in 
his  brief  career  he  had  struck  the  grander  notes  of  the 
coming  drama.  His  Jew  of  Malta  was  the  herald  of  Shy- 
lock.  He  opened  in  "  Edward  the  Second"  the  series  of 
historical  plays  which  gave  us  "  Csesar"  and  "  Richard  the 
Third."  His  "Faustus"  is  riotous,  grotesque,  and  full  of 
a  mad  thirst  for  pleasure,  but  it  was  the  first  dramatic  at- 
tempt to  touch  the  problem  of  the  relations  of  man  to  the 
unseen  world.  Extravagant,  unequal,  stooping  even  to 
the  ridiculous  in  his  cumbrous  and  vulgar  buffonery,  there 
is  a  force  in  Marlowe,  a  conscious  grandeur  of  tone,  a  range 
of  passion,  which  sets  him  above  all  his  contemporaries 
save  one.  In  the  higher  qualities  of  imagination,  as  in 
the  majesty  and  sweetness  of  his  "mighty  line,"  he  is  in- 
ferior to  Shakspere  alone. 

A  few  daring  jests,  a  brawl,  and  a  fatal  stab,  make  up 
the  life  of  Marlowe;  but  even  details  such  as  these  are 
wanting  to  the  life  of  William  Shakspere.  Of  hardly  any 
great  poet  indeed  do  we  know  so  little.  For  the  story  of 
his  youth  we  have  only  one  or  two  trifling  legends,  and 
these  almost  certainly  false.  Not  a  single  letter  or  char- 
acteristic saying,  not  one  of  the  jests  "  spoken  at  the  Mer- 
maid," hardly  a  single  anecdote,  remain  to  illustrate  his 
busy  life  in  London.  His  look  and  figure  in  later  age 
have  been  preserved  by  the  bust  over  his  tomb  at  Strat- 
ford, and  a  hundred  years  after  his  death  he  was  still  re- 
membered in  his  native  town ;  but  the  minute  diligence  of 
the  inquirers  of  the  Georgian  time  was  able  to  glean 
hardly  a  single  detail,  even  of  the  most  trivial  order,  which 
could  throw  light  upon  the  years  of  retirement  before  his 
death.  It  is  owing  perhaps  to  the  harmony  and  unity  of 
his  temper  that  no  salient  peculiarity  seems  to  have  left  its 
trace  on  the  memory  of  his  contemporaries ;  it  is  the  very 
grandeur  of  his  genius  which  precludes  us  from  discover- 
ing any  personal  trait  in  his  work.  His  supposed  self- 
revelation  in  the  Sonnets  is  so  obscure  that  only  a  few  out- 
lines can  be  traced  even  by  the  boldest  conjecture.  In  hia 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540^1803.  475 

dramas  he  is  all  his  characters,  and  his  characters  range 
over  all  mankind.  There  is  not  one,  or  the  act  or  word  of 
one  that  we  can  identify  personally  with  the  poet  himself. 
He  was  born  in  1564,  the  sixth  year  of  Elizabeth's  reign, 
twelve  years  after  the  birth  of  Spenser,  three  years  later 
than  the  birth  of  Bacon.  Marlowe  was  of  the  same  age 
with  Shakspere :  Greene  probably  a  few  years  older.  His 
father,  a  glover  and  small  farmer  of  Stratford-on-Avon, 
was  forced  by  poverty  to  lay  down  his  office  of  alderman 
as  his  son  reached  boyhood ;  and  stress  of  poverty  may 
have  been  the  cause  which  drove  William  Shakspere,  who 
was  already  married  at  eighteen  to  a  wife  older  than  him- 
self, to  London  and  the  stage.  His  life  in  the  capital  can 
hardly  have  begun  later  than  in  his  twenty-third  year,  the 
memorable  year  which  followed  Sidney's  death,  which 
preceded  the  coming  of  the  Armada,  and  which  witnessed 
the  production  of  Marlowe's  "Tamburlaine."  If  we  take 
the  language  of  the  Sonnets  as  a  record  of  his  personal 
feeling,  his  new  profession  as  an  actor  stirred  in  him  only 
the  bitterness  of  self-contempt.  He  chides  with  Fortune 
"  that  did  not  better  for  my  life  provide  than  public  means 
that  public  manners  breed;"  he  writhes  at  the  thought 
that  he  has  "  made  himself  a  motley  to  the  view"  of  the 
gaping  apprentices  in  a  pit  of  Blackfriars.  "  Thence  comes 
it,"  he  adds,  "that  my  name  receives  a  brand,  and  almost 
thence  my  nature  is  subdued  to  that  it  works  in."  But  the 
application  of  the  words  is  a  more  than  doubtful  one.  In 
spite  of  petty  squabbles  with  some  of  his  dramatic  rivals 
at  the  outset  of  his  career,  the  genial  nature  of  the  new- 
comer seems  to  have  won  him  a  general  love  among  his 
fellows.  In  1592,  while  still  a  mere  actor  and  fitter  of  old 
plays  for  the  stage,  a  fellow-playwright,  Chettle,  answered 
Greene's  attack  on  him  in  words  of  honest  affection :  "  My- 
self have  seen  his  demeanor  no  less  civil  than  he  excellent 
in  the  quality  he  professes:  besides,  divers  of  worship 
have  reported  his  uprightness  of  dealing,  which  argues  his 
honesty,  and  his  facetious  grace  in  writing,  that  approves 


476  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  YL 

his  art."  His  partner  Burbage  spoke  of  him  after  death 
as  a  "  worthy  friend  and  fellow ;"  and  Jonson  handed  down 
the  general  tradition  of  his  time  when  he  described  him  as 
"indeed  honest,  and  of  an  open  and  free  nature." 

His  profession  as  an  actor  was  at  any  rate  of  essential 
service  to  him  in  the  poetic  career  which  he  soon  under- 
took. Not  only  did  it  give  him  the  sense  of  theatrical 
necessities  which  makes  his  plays  so  effective  on  the  boards, 
but  it  enabled  him  to  bring  his  pieces  as  he  wrote  them  to 
the  test  of  the  stage.  If  there  is  any  truth  in  Jonson's 
statement  that  Shakspere  never  blotted  a  line,  there  is  no 
justice  in  the  censure  which  it  implies  on  his  carelessness 
or  incorrectness.  The  conditions  of  poetic  publication 
were  in  fact  wholly  different  from  those  of  our  own  day. 
A  drama  remained  for  years  in  manuscript  as  an  acting 
piece,  subject  to  continual  revision  and  amendment ;  and 
every  rehearsal  and  representation  afforded  hints  for  change 
which  we  know  the  young  poet  was  far  from  neglecting. 
The  chance  which  has  preserved  an  earlier  edition  of  his 
"  Hamlet"  shows  in  what  an  unsparing  way  Shakspere 
could  recast  even  the  finest  products  of  his  genius.  Five 
years  after  the  supposed  date  of  his  arrival  in  London  he 
was  already  famous  as  a  dramatist.  Greene  speaks  bit- 
terly of  him  under  the  name  of  "  Shakescene"  as  an  "  up- 
start crow  beautified  with  our  feathers,"  a  sneer  which 
points  either  to  his  celebrity  as  an  actor  or  to  his  prepara- 
tion for  loftier  flights  by  fitting  pieces  of  his  predecessors 
for  the  stage.  He  was  soon  partner  in  the  theatre,  actor, 
and  playwright ;  and  another  nickname,  that  of  "  Johannes 
Factotum"  or  Jack-of -all- Trades,  shows  his  readiness  k> 
take  all  honest  work  which  came  to  hand. 

With  his  publication  in  1593  of  the  poem  of  "Venus  and 
Adonis,"  "the  first  heir  of  my  invention"  as  Shakspere 
calls  it,  the  period  of  independent  creation  fairly  began. 
The  date  of  its  publication  was  a  very  memorable  one. 
The  "  Faerie  Queen"  had  appeared  only  three  years  before, 
and  had  placed  Spenser  without  a  rival  at  the  head  of 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  477 

English  poetry.  On  the  other  hand  the  two  leading  dram- 
atists of  the  time  passed  at  this  moment  suddenly  away. 
Greene  died  in  poverty  and  self-reproach  in  the  house  of  a 
poor  shoemaker.  "Doll,"  he  wrote  to  the  wife  he  had 
abandoned,  "  I  charge  thee,  by  the  love  of  our  youth  and 
by  my  soul's  rest,  that  thou  wilt  see  this  man  paid ;  for  if 
he  and  his  wife  had  not  succored  me  I  had  died  in  the 
streets."  "  Oh,  that  a  year  were  granted  me  to  live,"  cried 
the  young  poet  from  his  bed  of  death,  "  but  I  must  die,  of 
every  man  abhorred !  Time,  loosely  spent,  will  not  again 
be  won !  My  time  is  loosely  spent — and  I  undone !"  A 
year  later  the  death  of  Marlowe  in  a  street  brawl  removed 
the  only  rival  whose  powers  might  have  equalled  Shak- 
spere's  own.  He  was  now  about  thirty ;  and  the  twenty- 
three  years  which  elapsed  between  the  appearance  of  the 
"  Adonis"  and  his  death  were  filled  with  a  series  of  master- 
pieces. Nothing  is  more  characteristic  of  his  genius  than 
its  incessant  activity.  Through  the  five  years  which  fol- 
lowed the  publication  of  his  early  poem  he  seems  to  have 
produced  on  an  average  two  dramas  a  year.  When  we 
attempt  however  to  trace  the  growth  and  progress  of  the 
poet's  mind  in  the  order  of  his  plays  we  are  met  in  the 
case  of  many  of  them  by  an  absence  of  certain  information 
as  to  the  dates  of  their  appearance.  The  facts  on  which 
inquiry  has  to  build  are  extremely  few.  "Venus  and 
Adonis,"  with  the  "Lucrece,"  must  have  been  written 
before  their  publication  in  1593-94 ;  the  Sonnets,  though 
not  published  till  1609,  were  known  in  some  form  among 
his  private  friends  as  early  as  1598.  His  earlier  plays  are 
defined  by  a  list  given  in  the  "  Wit's  Treasury"  of  Francis 
Meres  in  1598,  though  the  omission  of  a  play  from  a  casual 
catalogue  of  this  kind  would  hardly  warrant  us  in  assum- 
ing its  necessary  non-existence  at  the  time.  The  works 
ascribed  to  him  at  his  death  are  fixed  in  the  same  approxi- 
mate fashion  through  the  edition  published  by  his  fellow- 
actors.  Beyond  these  meagre  facts  and  our  knowledge  of 
the  publication  of  a  few  of  his  dramas  in  his  lifetime  all  is 


478  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VL 

uncertain;  and  the  conclusions  which  have  been  drawn 
from  these,  and  from  the  dramas  themselves,  as  well  as 
from  the  assumed  resemblances  with,  or  references  to, 
other  plays  of  the  period  can  only  be  accepted  as  approxi- 
mations to  the  truth. 

The  bulk  of  his  lighter  comedies  and  historical  dramas 
can  be  assigned  with  fair  probability  to  a  period  from 
about  1593,  when  Shakspere  was  known  as  nothing  more 
than  an  adapter,  to  1598,  when  they  are  mentioned  in  the 
list  of  Meres.  They  bear  on  them  indeed  the  stamp  of 
youth.  In  "  Love's  Labor's  Lost"  the  young  playwright, 
fresh  from  his  own  Stratford,  its  "  daisies  pied  and  violets 
blue,"  with  the  gay  bright  music  of  its  country  ditties  still 
in  his  ears,  flings  himself  into  the  midst  of  the  brilliant 
England  which  gathered  round  Elizabeth,  busying  himself 
as  yet  for  the  most  part  with  the  surface  of  it,  with  the 
humors  and  quixotisms,  the  wit  and  the  whim,  the  un- 
reality, the  fantastic  extravagance,  which  veiled  its  inner 
nobleness.  Country-lad  as  he  is,  Shakspere  shows  himself 
master  of  it  all;  he  can  patter  euphuism  and  exchange 
quip  and  repartee  with  the  best;  he  is  at  home  in  their  ped- 
antries and  affectations,  their  brag  and  their  rhetoric,  their 
passion  for  the  fantastic  and  the  marvellous.  He  can 
laugh  as  heartily  at  the  romantic  vagaries  of  the  courtly 
world  in  which  he  finds  himself  as  at  the  narrow  dulness, 
the  pompous  triflings,  of  the  country  world  which  he  has 
left  behind  him.  But  he  laughs  frankly  and  without 
malice ;  he  sees  the  real  grandeur  of  soul  which  underlies 
all  this  quixotry  and  word-play ;  and  owns  with  a  smile 
that  when  brought  face  to  face  with  the  facts  of  human 
life,  with  the  suffering  of  man  or  the  danger  of  England, 
these  fops  have  in  them  the  stuff  of  heroes.  He  shares  the 
delight  in  existence,  the  pleasure  in  sheer  living,  which 
was  so  marked  a  feature  of  the  age ;  he  enjoys  the  mis- 
takes, the  contrasts,  the  adventures,  of  the  men  about  him ; 
his  fun  breaks  almost  riotously  out  in  the  practical  jokes 
of  the  "  Taming  of  the  Shrew"  and  the  endless  blunderings 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1608.  479 

of  the  "Comedy  of  Errors."  In  these  earlier  efforts  his 
work  had  been  marked  by  little  poetic  elevation  or  by  pas- 
sion. But  the  easy  grace  of  the  dialogue,  the  dextrous 
management  of  a  complicated  story,  the  genial  gayety  of 
his  tone,  and  the  music  of  his  verse  promised  a  master  of 
social  comedy  as  soon  as  Shakspere  turned  from  the  su- 
perficial aspects  of  the  world  about  him  to  find  a  new  de- 
light in  the  character  and  actions  of  men.  The  interest  of 
human  character  was  still  fresh  and  vivid ;  the  sense  of 
individuality  drew  a  charm  from  its  novelty ;  and  poet  and 
essayist  were  busy  alike  in  sketching  the  "humors"  of 
mankind.  Shakspere  sketched  with  his  fellows.  In  the 
"  Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona"  his  painting  of  manners  was 
suffused  by  a  tenderness  and  ideal  beauty  which  formed  an 
effective  protest  against  the  hard  though  vigorous  char- 
acter-painting which  the  first  success  of  Ben  Jonson  in 
"  Every  Man  in  his  Humor"  brought  at  the  time  into  fash- 
ion. But  quick  on  these  lighter  comedies  followed  two  in 
which  his  genius  started  fully  into  life.  His  poetic  power, 
held  in  reserve  till  now,  showed  itself  with  a  splendid  pro- 
fusion in  the  brilliant  fancies  of  the  "  Midsummer  Night's 
Dream ;"  and  passion  swept  like  a  tide  of  resistless  delight 
through  "  Romeo  and  Juliet." 

Side  by  side  however  with  these  .passionate  dreams, 
these  delicate  imaginings  and  piquant  sketches  of  man- 
ners, had  been  appearing  during  this  short  interval  of  in- 
tense activity  a  series  of  dramas  which  mark  Shakspere's 
relation  to  the  new  sense  of  patriotism,  the  more  vivid 
sense  of  national  existence,  national  freedom,  national 
greatness,  which  gives  its  grandeur  to  the  age  of  Eliza- 
beth. England  itself  was  now  becoming  a  source  of  liter- 
ary interest  to  poet  and  prose-writer.  Warner  in  his 
"Albion's  England,"  Daniel  in  his  "Civil  Wars,"  em- 
balmed in  verse  the  record  of  her  past;  Drayton  in  his 
"  Polyolbion"  sang  the  fairness  of  the  land  itself,  the 
"tracts,  mountains,  forests,  and  other  parts  of  this  re- 
nowned isle  of  Britain."  The  national  pride  took  its 

21  VOL.  2 


480  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VX 

highest  poetic  form  in  the  historical  drama.  No  plays 
seem  to  have  been  more  popular  from  the  earliest  hours  of 
the  new  stage  than  dramatic  representations  of  our  history. 
Marlowe  had  shown  in  his  "Edward  the  Second"  what 
tragic  grandeur  could  be  reached  in  this  favorite  field; 
and,  as  we  have  seen,  Shakspere  had  been  led  naturally 
toward  it  by  his  earlier  occupation  as  an  adapter  of  stock 
pieces  like  "  Henry  the  Sixth"  for  the  new  requirements  of 
the  stage.  He  still  to  some  extent  followed  in  plan  the 
older  plays  on  the  subjects  he  selected,  but  in  his  treatment 
of  their  themes  he  shook  boldly  off  the  yoke  of  the  past. 
A  larger  and  deeper  conception  of  human  character  than 
any  of  the  old  dramatists  had  reached  displayed  itself  in 
Richard  the  Third,  in  Falstaff,  or  in  Hotspur;  while  in 
Constance  and  Richard  the  Second  the  pathos  of  human 
suffering  was  painted  as  even  Marlowe  had  never  dared  to 
paint  it. 

No  dramas  have  done  so  much  for  Shakspere's  enduring 
popularity  with  his  countrymen  as  these  historical  plays. 
They  have  done  more  than  all  the  works  of  English  histo- 
rians to  nourish  in  the  minds  of  Englishmen  a  love  of  and 
reverence  for  their  country's  past.  When  Chatham  was 
asked  where  he  had  read  his  English  history  he  answered, 
"  In  the  plays  of  Shakspere."  Nowhere  could  he  have  read 
it  so  well,  for  nowhere  is  the  spirit  of  our  history  so  nobly 
rendered.  If  the  poet's  work  echoes  sometimes  our  na- 
tional prejudice  and  unfairness  of  temper,  it  is  instinct 
throughout  with  English  humor,  with  our  English  love 
of  hard  fighting,  our  English  faith  in  goodness,  and  in  the 
doom  that  waits  upon  triumphant  evil,  our  English  pity 
for  the  fallen.  Shakspere  is  Elizabethan  to  the  core.  He 
stood  at  the  meeting-point  of  two  great  epochs  of  our  his- 
tory. The  age  of  the  Renascence  was  passing  into  the  age 
of  Puritanism.  Rifts  which  were  still  little  were  widen- 
ing every  hour,  and  threatening  ruin  to  the  fabric  of 
Church  and  State  which  the  Tudors  had  built  up.  A  new 
political  world  was  rising  into  being;  a  world  healthier, 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  481 

more  really  national,  but  less  picturesque,  less  wrapped  in 
the  mystery  and  splendor  that  poets  love.  Great  as  were 
the  faults  of  Puritanism,  it  may  fairly  claim  to  be  the  first 
political  system  which  recognized  the  grandeur  of  the  peo- 
ple as  a  whole.  As  great  a  change  was  passing  over  the 
spiritual  sympathies  of  men.  A  sterner  Protestantism 
was  invigorating  and  ennobling  life  by  its  morality,  its 
seriousness,  its  intense  conviction  of  God.  But  it  was  at 
the  same  time  hardening  and  narrowing  it.  The  Bible 
was  superseding  Plutarch.  The  "  obstinate  questionings'* 
which  haunted  the  finer  souls  of  the  Renascence  were  be- 
ing stereotyped  into  the  theological  formulas  of  the  Puritan. 
The  sense  of  a  divine  omnipotence  was  annihilating  man. 
The  daring  which  turned  England  into  a  people  of  "  ad- 
venturers," the  sense  of  inexhaustible  resources,  the  buoy- 
ant freshness  of  youth,  the  intoxicating  sense  of  beauty 
and  joy,  which  created  Sidney  and  Marlowe  and  Drake, 
were  passing  away  before  the  consciousness  of  evil  and  the 
craving  to  order  man's  life  aright  before  God. 

From  this  new  world  of  thought  and  feeling  Shakspere 
stood  aloof.  Turn  as  others  might  to  the  speculations  of 
theology,  man  and  man's  nature  remained  with  him  an 
inexhaustible  subject  of  interest.  Caliban  was  among  his 
latest  creations.  It  is  impossible  to  discover  whether  his 
religious  belief  was  Catholic  or  Protestant.  It  is  hard  in- 
deed to  say  whether  he  had  any  religious  belief  or  no. 
The  religious  phrases  which  are  thinly  scattered  over  his 
works  are  little  more  than  expressions  of  a  distant  and  im- 
aginative reverence.  But  on  the  deeper  grounds  of  relig- 
ious faith  his  silence  is  significant.  He  is  silent,  and  the 
doubt  of  Hamlet  deepens  his  silence,  about  the  after  world. 
"  To  die,"  it  may  be,  was  to  him  as  it  was  to  Claudio,  "  to 
go  we  know  not  whither."  Often  as  his  questionings  turn 
to  the  riddle  of  life  and  death  he  leaves  it  a  riddle  to  the  last 
without  heeding  the  common  theological  solutions  around 
him.  "  We  are  such  stuff  as  dreams  are  made  of,  and  our 
little  life  is  rounded  with  a  sleep." 


482  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

Nor  were  the  political  sympathies  of  the  poet  those  of 
the  coming  time.  His  roll  of  dramas  is  the  epic  of  civil 
war.  The  Wars  of  the  Roses  fill  his  mind,  as  they  filled 
the  mind  of  his  contemporaries.  It  is  not  till  we  follow 
him  through  the  series  of  plays  from  "  Richard  the  Second" 
to  "  Henry  the  Eighth"  that  we  realize  how  profoundly  the 
memory  of  the  struggle  between  York  and  Lancaster  had 
moulded  the  temper  of  the  people,  how  deep  a  dread  of  civil 
war,  of  baronial  turbulence,  of  disputes  over  the  succession 
to  the  throne,  it  had  left  behind  it.  Men  had  learned  the 
horrors  of  the  time  from  their  fathers;  they  had  drunk  in 
with  their  childhood  the  lesson  that  such  a  chaos  of  weak- 
ness and  misrule  must  never  be  risked  again.  From  such 
a  risk  the  Crown  seemed  the  one  security.  With  Shak- 
spere  as  with  his  fellow-countrymen  the  Crown  is  still  the 
centre  and  safeguard  of  the  national  life.  His  ideal  Eng- 
land is  an  England  grouped  around  a  noble  king,  a  king 
such  as  his  own  Henry  the  Fifth,  devout,  modest,  simple 
as  he  is  brave,  but  a  lord  in  battle,  a  born  ruler  of  men, 
with  a  loyal  people  about  him  and  his  enemies  at  his  feet. 
Socially  the  poet  reflects  the  aristocratic  view  of  social  life 
which  was  shared  by  all  the  nobler  spirits  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan time.  Coriolanus  is  the  embodiment  of  a  great 
noble ;  and  the  taunts  which  Shakspere  hurls  in  play  after 
play  at  the  rabble  only  echo  the  general  temper  of  the  Re- 
nascence. But  he  shows  no  sympathy  with  the  struggle  of 
feudalism  against  the  Crown.  If  he  paints  Hotspur  with 
a  fire  which  proves  how  thoroughly  he  could  sympathize 
with  the  rough,  bold  temper  of  the  baronage,  he  suffers 
him  to  fall  unpitied  before  Henry  the  Fourth.  Apart 
however  from  the  strength  and  justice  of  its  rule,  royalty 
has  no  charm  for  him.  He  knows  nothing  of  the  "  right 
divine  of  kings  to  govern  wrong"  which  became  the  doc- 
trine of  prelates  and  courtiers  in  the  age  of  the  Stuarts. 
He  shows  in  his  "Richard  the  Second"  the  doom  that 
waits  on  a  lawless  despotism,  as  he  denounces  in  his 
"  Richard  the  Third"  the  selfish  and  merciless  ambition 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  483 

that  severs  a  ruler  from  his  people.  But  the  dread  of  mis- 
rule was  a  dim  and  distant  one.  Shakspere  had  grown  up 
under  the  reign  of  Elizabeth ;  he  hao  known  no  ruler  save 
one  who  had  cast  a  spell  over  the  hearts  of  Englishmen. 
His  thoughts  were  absorbed,  as  those  of  the  country  were 
absorbed,  in  the  struggle  for  national  existence  which 
centred  round  the  Queen.  "  King  John"  is  a  trumpet-call 
to  rally  round  Elizabeth  in  her  fight  for  England.  Again 
a  Pope  was  asserting  his  right  to  depose  an  English  sov- 
ereign and  to  loose  Englishmen  from  their  bond  of  alle- 
giance. Again  political  ambitions  ana  civil  discord  woke 
at  the  call  of  religious  war.  Again  a  foreign  power  was 
threatening  England  at  the  summons  of  Rome,  and  hoping 
to  master  her  with  the  aid  of  revolted  Englishmen.  The 
heat  of  such  a  struggle  as  this  left  no  time  for  the  thought 
of  civil  liberties.  Shakspere  casts  aside  the  thought  of  the 
Charter  to  fix  himself  on  the  strife  of  the  stranger  for 
England  itself.  What  he  sang  was  the  duty  of  patriotism, 
the  grandeur  of  loyalty,  the  freedom  of  England  from  Pope 
or  Spaniard,  its  safety  within  its  "  water- walled  bulwark," 
if  only  its  national  union  was  secure.  And  now  that  the 
nation  was  at  one,  now  that  he  had  seen  in  his  first  years 
of  London  life  Catholics  as  well  as  Protestants  trooping  to 
the  muster  at  Tilbury  and  hasting  down  Thames  to  the 
fight  in  the  Channel,  he  could  thrill  his  hearers  with  the 
proud  words  that  sum  up  the  work  of  Elizabeth : — 

"This  England  never  did,  nor  never  shall, 
Lie  at  the  proud  foot  of  a  conqueror, 
But  when  it  first  did  help  to  wound  itself. 
Now  that  her  princes  are  come  home  again, 
Come  the  three  corners  of  the  world  in  arms, 
And  we  shall  shock  them  !    Naught  ehall  make  us  rue 
If  England  to  itself  do  rest  but  true. " 

With  this  great  series  of  historical  and  social  dramas 
Shakspere  had  passed  far  beyond  his  fellows  whether  as  a 
tragedian  or  as  a  writer  of  comedy.  "The  Muses,"  said 
Meres  in  1598,  "would  speak  with  Shakspere's  fine-filed 


484  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VL 

phrase,  if  they  would  speak  English."  His  personal  pop- 
ularity was  now  at  its  height.  His  pleasant  temper  and 
the  vivacity  of  his  wit  had  drawn  him  early  into  contact 
with  the  young  Earl  of  Southampton,  to  whom  his 
"  Adonis"  and  "  Lucrece"  are  dedicated ;  and  the  different 
tone  of  the  two  dedications  shows  how  rapidly  acquaint- 
ance ripened  into  an  ardent  friendship.  Shakspere's 
wealth  and  influence  too  were  growing  fast.  He  had 
property  both  in  Stratford  and  London,  and  his  fellow- 
townsmen  made  him  their  suitor  to  Lord  Burleigh  for 
favors  to  be  bestowed  on  Stratford.  He  was  rich  enough 
to  aid  his  father,  and  to  buy  the  house  at  Stratford  which 
afterward  became  his  home.  The  tradition  that  Elizabeth 
was  so  pleased  with  Falstaff  in  "  Henry  the  Fourth"  that 
she  ordered  the  poet  to  show  her  Falstaff  in  love — an  order 
which  produced  the  "  Merry  Wives  of  Windsor" — whether 
true  or  false,  proves  his  repute  as  a  playwright.  As  the 
group  of  earlier  poets  passed  away,  they  found  successors 
in  Marston,  Dekker,  Middleton,  Heywood,  and  Chapman, 
and  above  all  in  Ben  Jonson.  But  none  of  these  could 
dispute  the  supremacy  of  Shakspere.  The  verdict  of  Meres 
that  "  Shakspere  among  the  English  is  the  most  excellent 
in  both  kinds  for  the  stage,"  represented  the  general  feel- 
ing of  his  contemporaries.  He  was  at  last  fully  master  of 
the  resources  of  his  art.  The  "Merchant  of  Venice" 
marks  the  perfection  of  his  development  as  a  dramatist  in 
the  completeness  of  its  stage  effect,  the  ingenuity  of  its  in- 
cidents, the  ease  of  its  movement,  the  beauty  of  its  higher 
passages,  the  reserve  and  self-control  with  which  its  poetry 
is  used,  the  conception  and  unfolding  of  character,  and 
above  all  the  mastery  with  which  character  and  event  is 
grouped  round  the  figure  of  Shylock.  Master  as  he  is  of 
his  art,  the  port's  temper  is  still  young ;  the  "  Merry  Wivei 
of  Windsor"  is  a  burst  of  gay  laughter ;  and  laughter  more 
tempered,  yet  full  of  a  sweeter  fascination,  rings  round  us 
in  "As  You  Like  It." 
But  in  the  melancholy  and  meditative  Jaques  of  the  last 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1608.  485 

drama  we  feel  the  touch  of  a  new  and  graver  mood. 
Youth,  so  full  and  buoyant  in  the  poet  till  now,  seems  to 
have  passed  almost  suddenly  away.  Though  Shakspere 
had  hardly  reached  forty,  in  one  of  his  Sonnets  which  can- 
not have  been  written  at  a  much  later  time  than  this  there 
are  indications  that  he  already  felt  the  advance  of  prema- 
ture age.  And  at  this  moment  the  outer  world  suddenly 
darkened  around  him.  The  brilliant  circle  of  young  nobles 
whose  friendship  he  had  shared  was  broken  up  in  1601  by 
the  political  storm  which  burst  in  a  mad  struggle  of  the 
Earl  of  Essex  for  power.  Essex  himself  fell  on  the  scaf- 
fold ;  his  friend  and  Shakspere's  idol,  Southampton,  passed 
a  prisoner  into  the  Tower;  Herbert  Lord  Pembroke, 
a  younger  patron  of  the  poet,  was  banished  from  the  Court. 
While  friends  were  thus  falling  and  hopes  fading  without, 
Shakspere's  own  mind  seems  to  have  been  going  through  a 
phase  of  bitter  suffering  and  unrest.  In  spite  of  the  in- 
genuity of  commentators,  it  is  difficult  and  even  impossible 
to  derive  any  knowledge  of  Shakspere's  inner  history  from 
the  Sonnets;  "the  strange  imagery  of  passion  which 
passes  over  the  magic  mirror,"  it  has  been  finely  said, 
"has  no  tangible  evidence  before  or  behind  it."  But  its 
mere  passing  is  itself  an  evidence  of  the  restlessness  and 
agony  within.  The  change  in  the  character  of  his  dramas 
gives  a  surer  indication  of  his  change  of  mood.  The  fresh 
joyousness,  the  keen  delight  in  life  and  in  man,  which 
breathes  through  Shakspere's  early  work  disappears  in 
comedies  such  as  "Troilus"  and  "Measure  for  Measure." 
Disappointment,  disillusion,  a  new  sense  of  the  evil  and 
foulness  that  underlies  so  much  of  human  life,  a  loss  of  the 
old  frank  trust  in  its  beauty  and  goodness,  threw  their 
gloom  over  these  comedies.  Failure  seems  everywhere. 
In  "  Julius  Caesar"  the  virtue  of  Brutus  is  foiled  by  its 
ignorance  of  and  isolation  from  mankind ;  in  Hamlet  even 
penetrating  intellect  proves  helpless  for  want  of  the  capacity 
of  action ;  the  poison  of  lago  taints  the  love  of  Desdemona 
and  the  grandeur  of  Othello;  Lear's  mighty  passion  battles 


486  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

helplessly  against  the  wind  and  the  rain ;  a  woman's  weak- 
ness of  frame  dashes  the  cup  of  her  triumph  from  the  hand 
of  Lady  Macbeth ;  lust  and  self-indulgence  blast  the  hero- 
ism of  Antony;  pride  ruins  the  nobleness  of  Coriolanus. 

But  the  very  struggle  and  self -introspection  that  these 
dramas  betray  were  to  give  a  depth  and  grandeur  to  Shak- 
spere's  work  such  as  it  had  never  known  before.  The  age 
was  one  in  which  man's  temper  and  powers  took  a  new 
range  and  energy.  Sidney  or  Raleigh  lived  not  one  but  a 
dozen  lives  at  once;  the  daring  of  the  adventurer,  the 
philosophy  of  the  scholar,  the  passion  of  the  lover,  the  fan- 
aticism of  the  saint,  towered  into  almost  superhuman 
grandeur.  Man  became  conscious  of  the  immense  re- 
sources that  lay  within  him,  conscious  of  boundless  powers 
that  seemed  to  mock  the  narrow  world  in  which  they 
moved.  All  through  the  age  of  the  Renascence  one  feels 
this  impress  of  the  gigantic,  this  giant-like  activity,  this 
immense  ambition  and  desire.  The  very  bombast  and  ex- 
travagance of  the  times  reveal  cravings  and  impulses  be- 
fore which  common  speech  broke  down.  It  is  this  gran- 
deur of  humanity  that  finds  its  poetic  expression  in  the  later 
work  of  Shakspere.  As  the  poet  penetrated  deeper  and 
deeper  into  the  recesses  of  the  soul,  he  saw  how  great  and 
wondrous  a  thing  was  man.  "  What  a  piece  of  work  is  a 
man,"  cries  Hamlet;  "how  noble  in  reason;  how  infinite 
in  faculty ;  in  form  and  moving  how  express  and  admirable ; 
in  action  how  like  an  angel ;  in  apprehension  how  like  a 
god ;  the  beauty  of  the  world ;  the  paragon  of  animals !" 
It  is  the  wonder  of  man  that  spreads  before  us  as  the  poet 
pictures  the  wide  speculation  of  Hamlet,  the  awful  convul- 
sion of  a  great  nature  in  Othello,  the  terrible  storm  in  the 
soul  of  Lear  which  blends  with  the  very  storm  of  the 
heavens  themselves,  the  awful  ambition  that  nerved  a 
woman's  hand  to  dabble  itself  with  the  blood  of  a  murdered 
king,  the  reckless  lust  that  "flung  away  a  world  for  love." 
Amid  the  terror  and  awe  of  these  great  dramas  we  learn 
something  of  the  vast  forces  of  the  age  from  which  they 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  487 

sprang.  The  passion  of  Mary  Stuart,  the  ruthlessness  of 
Alva,  the  daring  of  Drake,  the  chivalry  of  Sidney,  the 
range  of  thought  and  action  in  Kaleigh  or  Elizabeth,  come 
better  home  to  us  as  we  follow  the  mighty  series  of  trag- 
edies which  began  in  "  Hamlet"  and  ended  in  "  Coriolanus." 
Shakspere's  last  dramas,  the  three  exquisite  works  in 
which  he  shows  a  soul  at  rest  with  itself  and  with  the 
world,  "Cymbeline,"  "The  Tempest,"  "Winter's  Tale," 
were  written  in  the  midst  of  ease  and  competence,  in  a 
house  at  Stratford  to  which  he  withdrew  a  few  years  after 
the  death  of  Elizabeth.  In  them  we  lose  all  relations  with 
the  world  or  the  time  and  pass  into  a  region  of  pure  poetry. 
It  is  in  this  peaceful  and  gracious  close  that  the  life  of 
Shakspere  contrasts  most  vividly  with  that  of  his  greatest 
contemporary.  If  the  imaginative  resources  of  the  new 
England  were  seen  in  the  creators  of  Hamlet  and  the 
Faerie  Queen,  its  purely  intellectual  capacity,  its  vast 
command  over  the  stores  of  human  knowledge,  the  amaz- 
ing sense  of  its  own  powers  with  which  it  dealt  with  them, 
were  seen  in  the  work  of  Francis  Bacon.  Bacon  was  born 
in  1561,  three  years  before  the  birth  of  Shakspere.  He 
was  the  younger  son  of  a  Lord  Keeper,  as  well  as  the 
nephew  of  Lord  Burleigh,  and  even  in  childhood  his 
quickness  and  sagacity  won  the  favor  of  the  Queen. 
Elizabeth  "delighted  much  to  confer  with  him,  and  to 
prove  him  with  questions :  unto  which  he  delivered  himself 
with  that  gravity  and  maturity  above  his  years  that  her 
Majesty  would  of  ten  term  him  'the  young  Lord  Keeper.'  " 
Even  as  a  boy  at  college  he  expressed  his  dislike  of  the 
Aristotelian  philosophy,  as  a  "  philosophy  only  strong  for 
disputations  and  contentions  but  barren  of  the  production  of 
works  for  the  benefit  of  the  life  of  man. "  As  a  law  student 
of  twenty-one  he  sketched  in  a  tract  on  the  "  Greatest  Birth 
of  Time"  the  system  of  inductive  inquiry  which  he  was 
already  prepared  to  substitute  for  it.  The  speculations  of 
•he  young  thinker  however  were  interrupted  by  his  hopes 
it  Court  success.  But  these  were  soon  dashed  to  the 


488  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boos  VI. 

ground.  He  was  left  poor  by  his  father's  death;  the  ill- 
will  of  the  Cecils  barred  his  advancement  with  the  Queen: 
and  a  few  years  before  Shakspere's  arrival  in  London 
Bacon  entered  as  a  barrister  at  Gray's  Inn.  He  soon  be- 
came one  of  the  most  successful  lawyers  of  the  time.  At 
twenty-three  Bacon  was  a  member  of  the  House  of  Com- 
mons and  his  judgment  and  eloquence  at  once  brought 
him  to  the  front.  "  The  fear  of  every  man  that  heard  him 
was  lest  he  should  make  an  end,"  Ben  Jonson  tells  us. 
The  steady  growth  of  his  reputation  was  quickened  in  1597 
by  the  appearance  of  his  "  Essays,"  a  work  remarkable,  not 
merely  for  the  condensation  of  its  thought  and  its  felicity 
and  exactness  of  expression,  but  for  the  power  with  which 
it  applied  to  human  life  that  experimental  analysis  which 
Bacon  was  at  a  later  time  to  make  the  key  of  Science. 

His  fame  at  once  became  great  at  home  and  abroad,  but 
with  this  nobler  fame  Bacon  could  not  content  himself. 
He  was  conscious  of  great  powers  as  well  as  great  aims 
for  the  public  good :  and  it  was  a  time  when  such  aims 
could  hardly  be  realized  save  through  the  means  of  the 
Crown.  But  political  employment  seemed  farther  off 
than  ever.  At  the  outset  of  his  career  in  Parliament  he 
irritated  Elizabeth  by  a  firm  opposition  to  her  demand  of 
a  subsidy ;  and  though  the  offence  was  atoned  for  by  pro- 
fuse apologies  and  by  the  cessation  of  all  further  resistance 
to  the  policy  of  the  Court,  the  law  offices  of  the  Crown 
were  more  than  once  refused  to  him,  and  it  was  only  after 
the  publication  of  his  "  Essays"  that  he  could  obtain  some 
slight  promotion  as  a  Queen's  Counsel.  The  moral  weak- 
ness which  more  and  more  disclosed  itself  is  the  best  justi- 
fication of  the  Queen  in  her  reluctance — a  reluctance  so 
greatly  in  contrast  with  her  ordinary  course — to  bring  the 
wisest  head  in  her  realm  to  her  Council-board.  The  men 
whom  Elizabeth  employed  were  for  the  most  part  men 
whose  intellect  was  directed  by  a  strong  sense  of  public 
duty.  Their  reverence  for  the  Queen,  strangely  exagger- 
ated as  it  may  seem  to  us,  was  guided  and  controlled  by 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.    1540—1608.  489 

an  ardent  patriotism  and  an  earnest  sense  of  religion ;  and 
with  all  their  regard  for  the  royal  prerogative,  they  never 
lost  their  regard  for  the  law.  The  grandeur  and  origin- 
ality of  Bacon's  intellect  parted  him  from  men  like  these 
quite  as  much  as  the  bluntness  of  his  moral  perceptions.  In 
politics,  as  in  science,  he  had  little  reverence  for  the  past. 
Law,  constitutional  privileges,  or  religion,  were  to  him 
simply  means  of  bringing  about  certain  ends  of  good  gov* 
ernment;  and  if  these  ends  could  be  brought  about  in 
shorter  fashion  he  saw  only  pedantry  in  insisting  on  more 
cumbrous  means.  He  had  great  social  and  political  ideas 
to  realize,  the  reform  and  codification  of  the  law,  the  civil- 
ization of  Ireland,  the  purification  of  the  Church,  the  union 
— at  a  later  time — of  Scotland  and  England,  educational 
projects,  projects  of  material  improvement,  and  the  like ; 
and  the  direct  and  shortest  way  of  realizing  these  ends 
was,  in  Bacon's  eyes,  the  use  of  the  power  of  the  Crown. 
But  whatever  charm  such  a  conception  of  the  royal  power 
might  have  for  her  successor,  it  had  little  charm  for  Eliza- 
beth ;  and  to  the  end  of  her  reign  Bacon  was  foiled  in  his 
efforts  to  rise  in  her  service. 

Political  activity  however  and  court  intrigue  left  room 
in  his  mind  for  the  philosophical  speculation  which  had 
begun  with  his  earliest  years.  Amid  debates  in  parlia- 
ment and  flatteries  in  the  closet  Bacon  had  been  silently 
framing  a  new  philosophy.  It  made  its  first  decisive  ap- 
pearance after  the  final  disappointment  of  his  hopes  from 
Elizabeth  in  the  publication  of  the  "Advancement  of 
Learning."  The  close  of  this  work  was,  in  his  own 
words,  "  a  general  and  faithful  perambulation  of  learning, 
with  an  inquiry  what  parts  thereof  lie  fresh  and  waste 
and  not  improved  and  converted  by  the  industry  of  man ; 
to  the  end  that  such  a  plot,  made  and  recorded  to  memory, 
may  both  minister  light  to  any  public  designation  and  also 
serve  to  excite  voluntary  endeavors."  It  was  only  by  such 
a  survey,  he  held,  that  men  could  be  turned  from  useless 
studies,  or  ineffectual  means  of  pursuing  more  useful  ones, 


490  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boos  VI. 

and  directed  to  the  true  end  of  knowledge  as  "  a  rich  store- 
house for  the  glory  of  the  Creator  and  the  relief  of  man's 
estate."  The  work  was  in  fact  the  preface  to  a  series  of 
treatises  which  were  intended  to  be  built  up  into  an  "  In- 
stauratio  Magna,"  which  its  author  was  never  destined  to 
complete,  and  of  which  the  parts  that  we  possess  were 
published  in  the  following  reign.  The  "  Cogitata  et  Visa" 
was  a  first  sketch  of  the  "Novum  Organum,"  which  in  its 
complete  form  was  presented  to  James  in  1621.  A  year 
later  Bacon  produced  his- "  Natural  and  Experimental  His- 
tory." This,  with  the  "Novum  Organum"  and  the  "Ad- 
vancement of  Learning,"  was  all  of  his  projected  "In- 
stauratio  Magna"  which  he  actually  finished;  and  even 
of  this  portion  we  have  only  part  of  the  last  two  divisions. 
The  "Ladder  of  the  Understanding,"  which  was  to  have 
followed  these  and  led  up  from  experience  to  science,  the 
"Anticipations,"  or  provisional  hypotheses  for  the  inqui- 
ries of  the  new  philosophy,  and  the  closing  account  of 
"  Science  in  Practice"  were  left  for  posterity  to  bring  to 
completion.  "We  may,  as  we  trust,"  said  Bacon,  "make 
no  despicable  beginnings.  The  destinies  of  the  human  race 
must  complete  it,  in  such  a  manner  perhaps  as  men  look- 
ing only  at  the  present  world  would  not  readily  conceive. 
For  upon  this  will  depend,  not  only  a  speculative  good, 
but  all  the  fortunes  of  mankind,  and  all  their  power. " 

When  we  turn  from  words  like  these  to  the  actual  work 
which  Bacon  did,  it  is  hard  not  to  feel  a  certain  disap- 
pointment. He  did  not  thoroughly  understand  the  older 
philosophy  which  he  attacked.  His  revolt  from  the  waste 
of  human  intelligence  which  he  conceived  to  be  owing  to 
the  adoption  of  a  false  method  of  investigation  blinded 
him  to  the  real  value  of  deduction  as  an  instrument  of  dis- 
covery ;  and  he  was  encouraged  in  his  contempt  for  it  as 
much  by  his  own  ignorance  of  mathematics  as  by  the  non- 
existence  in  his  day  of  the  great  deductive  sciences  of 
physics  and  astronomy.  Nor  had  he  a  more  accurate  pre- 
vision of  the  method  of  modern  science.  The  inductive 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1608.  491 

process  to  which  he  exclusively  directed  men's  attention 
bore  no  fruit  in  Bacon's  hands.  The  "  art  of  investigating 
nature"  on  which  he  prided  himself  has  proved  useless  for 
scientific  purposes,  and  would  be  rejected  by  modern  in- 
vestigators. Where  he  was  on  a  more  correct  track  he 
can  hardly  be  regarded  as  original.  "  It  may  be  doubted," 
says  Dugald  Stewart,  "whether  any  one  important  rule 
with  regard  to  the  true  method  of  investigation  be  con- 
tained in  his  works  of  which  no  hint  can  be  traced  in  those 
of  his  predecessors."  Not  only  indeed  did  Bacon  fail  to 
anticipate  the  methods  of  modern  science,  but  he  even  re- 
jected the  great  scientific  discoveries  of  his  own  day.  He 
set  aside  with  the  same  scorn  the  astronomical  theory  of 
Copernicus  and  the  magnetic  investigations  of  Gilbert. 
The  contempt  seems  to  have  been  fully  returned  by  the 
scientific  workers  of  his  day.  "The  Lord  Chancellor 
wrote  on  science,"  said  Harvey,  the  discoverer  of  the  cir- 
culation of  the  blood,  "like  a  Lord  Chancellor." 

In  spite  however  of  his  inadequate  appreciation  either 
of  the  old  philosophy  or  the  new,  the  almost  unanimous 
voice  of  later  ages  has  attributed,  and  justly  attributed,  to 
the  "Nbvum  Organum"  a  decisive  influence  on  the  de- 
velopment of  modern  science.  If  he  failed  in  revealing  the 
method  of  experimental  research,  Bacon  was  the  first  to 
proclaim  the  existence  of  a  Philosophy  of  Science,  to  insist 
on  the  unity  of  knowledge  and  inquiry  throughout  the 
physical  world,  to  give  dignity  by  the  large  and  noble 
temper  in  which  he  treated  them  to  the  petty  details  of 
experiment  in  which  science  had  to  begin,  to  clear  a  way 
for  it  by  setting  scornfully  aside  the  traditions  of  the  past, 
to  claim  for  it  its  true  rank  and  value,  and  to  point  to  the 
enormous  results  which  its  culture  would  bring  in  increas- 
ing the  power  and  happiness  of  mankind.  In  one  respect 
his  attitude  was  in  the  highest  degree  significant.  The  age 
in  which  he  lived  was  one  in  which  theology  was  absorb- 
ing the  intellectual  energy  of  the  world.  He  was  the  ser- 
vant too  of  a  king  with  whom  theological  studies  super- 


492  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPI£.     [BOOK  VI. 

seded  all  others.  But  if  he  bowed  in  all  else  to  James, 
Bacon  would  not,  like  Casaubon,  bow  in  this.  He  would 
not  even,  like  Descartes,  attempt  to  transform  theology  by 
turning  reason  into  a  mode  of  theological  demonstration. 
He  stood  absolutely  aloof  from  it.  Though  as  a  politician 
he  did  not  shrink  from  dealing  with  such  subjects  as 
Church  Reform,  he  dealt  with  them  simply  as  matters  of 
civil  polity.  But  from  his  exhaustive  enumeration  of  the 
branches  of  human  knowledge  he  excluded  theology,  and 
theology  alone.  His  method  was  of  itself  inapplicable  to 
a  subject  where  the  premises  were  assumed  to  be  certain, 
and  the  results  known.  His  aim  was  to  seek  for  unknown 
results  by  simple  experiment.  It  was  against  received 
authority  and  accepted  tradition  in  matters  of  inquiry  that 
his  whole  system  protested ;  what  he  urged  was  the  need 
of  making  belief  rest  strictly  on  proof,  and  proof  rest  on 
the  conclusions  drawn  from  evidence  by  reason.  But  in 
theology — all  theologians  asserted — reason  played  but  a 
subordinate  part.  "If  I  proceed  to  treat  of  it,"  said 
Bacon,  "  I  shall  step  out  of  the  bark  of  human  reason,  and 
enter  into  the  ship  of  the  Church.  Neither  will  the  stars 
of  philosophy,  which  have  hitherto  so  nobly  shone  on  us, 
any  longer  give  us  their  light." 

The  certainty  indeed  of  conclusions  on  such  subjects  was 
out  of  harmony  with  the  grandest  feature  of  Bacon's  work, 
his  noble  confession  of  the  liability  of  every  inquirer  to 
error.  It  was  his  especial  task  to  warn  men  against  the 
"vain  shows"  of  knowledge  which  had  so  long  hindered 
any  real  advance  in  it,  the  "  idols"  of  the  Tribe,  the  Den, 
the  Forum,  and  the  Theatre,  the  errors  which  spring  from 
the  systematizing  spirit  which  pervades  all  masses  of  men, 
or  from  individual  idiosyncrasies,  or  from  the  strange 
power  of  words  and  phrases  over  the  mind,  or  from  the 
traditions  of  the  past.  Nor  were  the  claims  of  theology 
easily  to  be  reconciled  with  the  position  which  he  was 
resolute  to  assign  to  natural  science.  "  Through  all  those 
ages,"  Bacon  says,  "wherein  men  of  genius  or  learning 


CHAP.  7.]         THE  REFORMATION.      1640—1608.  493 

principally  or  even  moderately  flourished,  the  smallest 
part  of  human  industry  has  been  spent  on  natural  phil- 
osophy, though  this  ought  to  be  esteemed  as  the  great 
mother  of  the  sciences ;  for  all  the  rest,  if  torn  from  this 
root,  may  perhaps  be  polished  and  formed  for  use,  but  can 
receive  little  increase."  It  was  by  the  adoption  of  the 
method  of  inductive  inquiry  which  physical  science  was 
to  make  its  own,  and  by  basing  inquiry  on  grounds  which 
physical  science  could  supply,  that  the  moral  sciences, 
ethics  and  politics,  could  alone  make  any  real  advance. 
"Let  none  expect  any  great  promotion  of  the  sciences, 
especially  in  their  effective  part,  unless  natural  philosophy 
be  drawn  out  to  particular  sciences;  and,  again,  unless 
these  particular  sciences  be  brought  back  again  to  natural 
philosophy.  From  this  defect  it  is  that  astronomy,  optics, 
music,  many  mechanical  arts,  and  (what  seems  stranger) 
even  moral  and  civil  philosophy  and  logic  rise  but  little 
above  the  foundations,  and  only  skim  over  the  varieties 
and  surfaces  of  things."  It  was  this  lofty  conception  of 
the  position  and  destiny  of  natural  science  which  Bacon 
was  the  first  to  impress  upon  mankind  at  large.  The  age 
was  one  in  which  knowledge  was  passing  to  fields  of  in- 
quiry which  had  till  then  been  unknown,  in  which  Kepler 
and  Galileo  were  creating  modern  astronomy,  in  which 
Descartes  was  revealing  the  laws  of  motion,  and  Harvey 
the  circulation  of  the  blood.  But  to  the  mass  of  men  this 
great  change  was  all  but  imperceptible;  and  it  was  the 
energy,  the  profound  conviction,  the  eloquence  of  Bacon 
which  first  called  the  attention  of  mankind  as  a  whole  to 
the  power  and  importance  of  physical  research.  It  was  he 
who  by  his  lofty  faith  in  the  results  and  victories  of  the 
new  philosophy  nerved  its  followers  to  a  zeal  and  confi- 
dence equal  to  his  own.  It  was  he  above  all  who  gave  dig- 
nity to  the  slow  and  patient  processes  of  investigation,  of 
experiment,  of  comparison,  to  the  sacrifice  of  hypothesis 
to  fact,  to  the  single  aim  after  truth,  which  was  to  be  tht 
law  of  modern  science. 


494  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [Boos  VL 

While  England  thus  became  "a  nest  of  singing  birds," 
while  Bacon  was  raising  the  lofty  fabric  of  his  philosoph- 
ical speculation,  the  people  itself  was  waking  to  a  new 
sense  of  national  freedom.  Elizabeth  saw  the  forces,  polit- 
ical and  religious,  which  she  had  stubbornly  held  in  check 
for  half  a  century  pressing  on  her  irresistibly.  In  spite  of 
the  rarity  of  its  assemblings,  in  spite  of  high  words  and 
imprisonment  and  dextrous  management,  the  Parliament 
had  quietly  gained  a  power  which,  at  her  accession,  the 
Queen  could  never  have  dreamed  of  its  possessing.  Step 
by  step  the  Lower  House  had  won  the  freedom  of  its 
members  from  arrest  save  by  its  own  permission,  the  right 
of  punishing  and  expelling  members  for  crimes  committed 
within  its  walls,  and  of  determining  all  matters  relating 
to  elections.  The  more  important  claim  of  freedom  of 
speech  had  brought  on  fro  n  time  to  time  a  series  of  petty 
conflicts  in  which  Elizabeth  generally  gave  way.  But  on 
this  point  the  Commons  still  shrank  from  any  consistent 
repudiation  of  the  Queen's  assumption  of  control.  A  bold 
protest  of  Peter  Wentworth  against  her  claim  to  exercise 
such  a  control  in  1575  was  met  indeed  by  the  House  itself. 
with  his  committal  to  the  Tower;  and  the  bolder  questions 
which  he  addressed  to  the  Parliament  of  1588,  "Whether 
this  Council  is  not  a  place  for  every  member  of  the  same 
freely  and  without  control,  by  bill  or  speech,  to  utter  any 
of  the  griefs  of  the  Commonwealth,"  brought  on  him  a 
fresh  imprisonment  at  the  hands  of  the  Council,  which 
lasted  till  the  dissolution  of  the  Parliament  and  with  which 
the  Commons  declined  to  interfere.  But  while  vacillating 
in  its  assertion  of  the  rights  of  individual  members,  the 
House  steadily  claimed  for  itself  a  right  to  discuss  even 
the  highest  matters  of  State.  Three  great  subjects,  the 
succession,  the  Church,  and  the  regulation  of  trade,  had 
been  regarded  by  every  Tudor  sovereign  as  lying  ex- 
clusively within  the  competence  of  the  Crown.  But  Par- 
liament had  again  and  again  asserted  its  right  to  consider 
the  succession.  It  persisted  in  spite  of  censure  and  rebuff 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1608.  495 

in  presenting  schemes  of  ecclesiastical  reform.  And  three 
years  before  Elizabeth's  death  it  dealt  boldly  with  matters 
of  trade.  Complaints  made  in  1571  of  the  licenses  and 
monopolies  by  which  internal  and  external  commerce  were 
fettered  were  repressed  by  a  royal  reprimand  as  matters 
neither  pertaining  to  the  Commons  nor  within  the  com- 
pass of  their  understanding.  When  the  subject  was  again 
stirred  nearly  twenty  years  afterward,  Sir  Edward  Hoby 
was  sharply  rebuked  by  "  a  great  personage"  for  his  com- 
plaint of  the  illegal  exactions  made  by  the  Exchequer. 
But  the  bill  which  he  promoted  was  sent  up  to  the  Lords 
in  spite  of  this,  and  at  the  close  of  Elizabeth's  reign  the 
storm  of  popular  indignation  which  had  been  roused  by 
the  growing  grievance  nerved  the  Commons,  in  1601,  to  a 
decisive  struggle.  It  was  in  vain  that  the  ministers  op- 
posed a  bill  for  the  Abolition  of  Monopolies,  and  after  four 
days  of  vehement  debate  the  tact  of  Elizabeth  taught  her 
to  give  way.  She  acted  with  her  usual  ability,  declared 
her  previous  ignorance  of  the  existence  of  the  evil,  thanked 
the  House  for  its  interference,  and  quashed  at  a  single  blow 
every  monopoly  that  she  had  granted. 

Dextrous  as  was  Elizabeth's  retreat,  the  defeat  was 
none  the  less  a  real  one.  Political  freedom  was  proving  it- 
self again  the  master  in  the  long  struggle  with  the  Crown. 
Nor  in  her  yet  fiercer  struggle  against  religious  freedom 
could  Elizabeth  look  forward  to  any  greater  success.  The 
sharp  suppression  of  the  Martin  Marprelate  pamphlets 
was  far  from  damping  the  courage  of  the  Presbyterians. 
Cartwright,  who  had  been  appointed  by  Lord  Leicester  to 
the  mastership  of  an  hospital  at  Warwick,  was  bold  enough 
to  organize  his  system  of  Church  discipline  among  the 
clergy  of  that  country  and  of  Northamptonshire.  His  ex- 
ample was  widely  followed ;  and  the  general  gatherings  of 
the  whole  ministerial  body  of  the  clergy  and  the  smaller 
assemblies  for  each  diocese  or  shire,  which  in  the  Presby- 
terian scheme  bore  the  name  of  Synods  and  Classes,  began 
to  be  held  in  many  parts  of  England  for  the  purposes  of  de- 


496  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

bate  and  consultation.  The  new  organization  was  quickly 
suppressed,  but  Cartwright  was  saved  from  the  banish- 
ment which  Whitgift  demanded  by  a  promise  of  submis- 
sion, and  his  influence  steadily  widened.  With  Presby< 
terianism  itself  indeed  Elizabeth  was  strong  enough  to  deal. 
Its  dogmatism  and  bigotry  was  opposed  to  the  better 
temper  of  the  age,  and  it  never  took  any  popular  hold  on 
England.  But  if  Presbyterianism  was  limited  to  a  few, 
Puritanism,  the  religious  temper  which  sprang  from  a 
deep  conviction  of  the  truth  of  Protestant  doctrines  and  of 
the  falsehood  of  Catholicism,  had  become  through  the 
struggle  with  Spain  and  the  Papacy  the  temper  of  three- 
fourths  of  the  English  people.  Unluckily  the  policy  of 
Elizabeth  did  its  best  to  give  to  the  Presbyterians  the  sup- 
port of  Puritanism.  Her  establishment  of  the  Ecclesias- 
tical Commission  had  given  fresh  life  and  popularity  to 
the  doctrines  which  it  aimed  at  crushing  by  drawing  to- 
gether two  currents  of  opinion  which  were  in  themselves 
perfectly  distinct.  The  Presbyterian  platform  of  Church 
discipline  had  as  yet  been  embraced  by  the  clergy  only, 
and  by  few  among  the  clergy.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
wish  for  a  reform  in  the  Liturgy,  the  dislike  of  "  supersti- 
tious usages,"  of  the  use  of  the  surplice,  the  sign  of  the 
cross  in  baptism,  the  gift  of  the  ring  in  marriage,  the  pos- 
ture of  kneeling  at  the  Lord's  Supper,  was  shared  by  a  large 
number  of  the  clergy  and  the  laity  alike.  At  the  opening 
of  Elizabeth's  reign  almost  all  the  higher  Churchmen  savo 
Parker  were  opposed  to  them,  and  a  motion  for  their  abo- 
lition in  Convocation  was  lost  but  by  a  single  vote.  The 
temper  of  the  country  gentlemen  on  this  subject  was  in- 
dicated by  that  of  Parliament ;  and  it  was  well  known 
that  the  wisest  of  the  Queen's  Councillors,  Burleigh, 
Walsingham,  and  Knollys,  were  at  one  time  in  this  mat- 
ter with  the  gentry.  If  their  common  persecution  did 
not  wholly  succeed  in  fusing  these  two  sections  of  relig- 
ious opinion  into  one,  it  at  any  rate  gained  for  the  Pres- 
byterians a  general  sympathy  on  the  part  of  the  Puritans, 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540-1608.  497 

which  raised  them  from  a  clerical  clique  into  a  popular 
party. 

But  if  Elizabeth's  task  became  more  difficult  at  home, 
the  last  years  of  her  reign  were  years  of  splendor  and 
triumph  abroad.  The  overthrow  of  Philip's  hopes  in 
France  had  been  made  more  bitter  by  the  final  overthrow 
of  his  hopes  at  sea.  In  1596  his  threat  of  a  fresh  Armada 
was  met  by  the  daring  descent  of  an  English  force  upon 
Cadiz.  The  town  was  plundered  and  burned  to  the 
ground ;  thirteen  vessels  of  war  were  fired  in  its  harbor, 
and  the  stores  accumulated  for  the  expedition  utterly  de- 
stroyed. In  spite  of  this  crushing  blow  a  Spanish  fleet 
gathered  in  the  following  year  and  set  sail  for  the  English 
coast ;  but  as  in  the  case  of  its  predecessor  storms  proved 
more  fatal  than  the  English  guns,  and  the  ships  were 
wrecked  and  almost  destroyed  in  the  Bay  of  Biscay. 
Meanwhile  whatever  hopes  remained  of  subjecting  the 
Low  Countries  were  destroyed  by  the  triumph  of  Henry 
of  Navarre.  A  triple  league  of  France,  England,  and  the 
Netherlands  left  Elizabeth  secure  to  the  eastward ;  and  the 
only  quarter  in  which  Philip  could  now  strike  a  blow  at 
her  was  the  great  dependency  of  England  in  the  west. 
Since  the  failure  of  the  Spanish  force  at  Smerwick  the 
power  of  the  English  government  had  been  recognized 
everywhere  throughout  Ireland.  But  it  was  a  power 
founded  solely  on  terror,  and  the  outrages  and  exactions 
of  the  soldiery  who  had  been  flushed  with  rapine  and 
bloodshed  in  the  south  sowed  during  the  years  which  fol- 
lowed the  reduction  of  Munster  the  seeds  of  a  revolt  more 
formidable  than  any  which  Elizabeth  had  yet  encountered 
The  tribes  of  Ulster,  divided  by  the  policy  of  Sidney,  were 
again  united  by  a  common  hatred  of  their  oppressors ;  and 
in  Hugh  O'Neill  they  found  a  leader  of  even  greater  ability 
than  Shane  himself.  Hugh  had  been  brought  up  at  the 
English  court  and  was  in  manners  and  bearing  an  Eng- 
lishman. He  had  been  rewarded  for  his  steady  loyalty  in 
previous  contests  by  a  grant  of  the  earldom  of  Tyrone,  and 


498  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.     [BOOK  VI. 

in  his  contest  with  a  rival  chieftain  of  his  clan  he  had  se- 
cured aid  from  the  government  by  an  offer  to  introduce  the 
English  laws  and  shire-system  into  his  new  country.  But 
he  was  no  sooner  undisputed  master  of  the  north  than  his 
tone  gradually  changed.  Whether  from  a  long-formed 
plan,  or  from  suspicion  of  English  designs  upon  himself, 
he  at  last  took  a  position  of  open  defiance. 

It  was  at  the  moment  when  the  Treaty  of  Vervins  and 
the  wreck  of  the  second  Armada  freed  Elizabeth's  hands 
from  the  struggle  with  Spain  that  the  revolt  under  Hugh 
O'Neill  broke  the  quiet  which  had  prevailed  since  the  vic- 
tories of  Lord  Grey.  The  Irish  question  again  became 
the  chief  trouble  of  the  Queen.  The  tide  of  her  recent 
triumphs  seemed  at  first  to  have  turned.  A  defeat  of  the 
English  forces  in  Tyrone  caused  a  general  rising  of  the 
northern  tribes,  and  a  great  effort  made  in  1599  for  the 
suppression  of  the  growing  revolt  failed  through  the  vanity 
and  disobedience,  if  not  the  treacherous  complicity,  of  the 
Queen's  lieutenant,  the  young  Earl  of  Essex.  His  suc- 
cessor, Lord  Mount-joy,  found  himself  master  on  his  ar- 
rival of  only  a  few  miles  round  Dublin.  But  in  three 
years  the  revolt  was  at  an  end.  A  Spanish  force  which 
landed  to  support  it  at  Kinsale  was  driven  to  surrender;  a 
line  of  forts  secured  the  country  as  the  English  mastered 
it;  all  open  opposition  was  crushed  out  by  the  energy  and 
the  ruthlessness  of  the  new  Lieutenant;  and  a  famine 
which  followed  on  his  ravages  completed  the  devastating 
work  of  the  sword.  Hugh  O'Neill  was  brought  in  triumph 
to  Dublin ;  the  Earl  of  Desmond,  who  had  again  roused 
Munster  into  revolt,  fled  for  refuge  to  Spain ;  and  the  work 
of  conquest  was  at  last  brought  to  a  close. 

The  triumph  of  Mountjoy  flung  its  lustre  over  the  last 
days  of  Elizabeth,  but  no  outer  triumph  could  break  the 
gloom  which  gathered  round  the  dying  Queen.  Lonely  as 
she  had  always  been,  her  loneliness  deepened  as  she  drew 
toward  the  grave.  The  statesmen  and  warriors  of  her 
earlier  days  had  dropped  one  by  one  from  her  Council- 


CHAP.  7.]  THE  REFORMATION.     1540—1603.  499 

board.  Leicester  had  died  in  the  year  of  the  Armada; 
two  years  later  Walsingham  followed  him  to  the  grave; 
in  1598  Burleigh  himself  passed  away.  Their  successors 
were  watching  her  last  moments,  and  intriguing  for  favor 
in  the  coming  reign.  Her  favorite,  Lord  Essex,  not  only 
courted  favor  with  James  of  Scotland,  but  brought  him  to 
suspect  Robert  Cecil,  who  had  succeeded  his  father  at  the 
Queen's  Council-board,  of  designs  against  his  succession. 
The  rivalry  between  the  two  ministers  hurried  Essex  into 
fatal  projects  which  led  to  his  failure  in  Ireland  and  to  an 
insane  outbreak  of  revolt  which  brought  him  in  1601  to 
the  block.  But  Cecil  had  no  sooner  proved  the  victor  in 
this  struggle  at  court  than  he  himself  entered  into  a  secret 
correspondence  with  the  King  of  Scots.  His  action  was 
wise :  it  brought  James  again  into  friendly  relations  with 
the  Queen;  and  paved  the  way  for  a  peaceful  transfer  of 
the  crown.  But  hidden  as  this  correspondence  was  from 
Elizabeth,  the  suspicion  of  it  only  added  to  her  distrust. 
The  troubles  of  the  war  in  Ireland  brought  fresh  cares  to 
the  aged  Queen.  It  drained  her  treasury.  The  old 
splendor  of  her  Court  waned  and  disappeared.  Only  offi- 
cials remained  about  her,  "  the  other  of  the  Council  and 
nobility  estrange  themselves  by  all  occasions."  The  love 
and  reverence  of  the  people  itself  lessened  as  they  felt  the 
pressure  and  taxation  of  the  war.  Of  old  men  had  pressed 
to  see  the  Queen  as  if  it  were  a  glimpse  of  heaven.  "  In 
the  year  1588,"  a  bishop  tells  us,  who  was  then  a  country 
boy  fresh  come  to  town,  "  I  did  live  at  the  upper  end  of  the 
Strand  near  St.  Clement's  church,  when  suddenly  there 
came  a  report  to  us  (it  was  in  December,  much  about  five 
of  the  clock  at  night,  very  dark)  that  the  Queen  was  gone 
to  Council,  'and  if  you  will  see  the  Queen  you  must  come 
quickly.'  Then  we  all  ran,  when  the  Court  gates  were  set 
open,  and  no  naan  did  hinder  us  from  coming  in.  There 
we  came,  where  there  was  a  far  greater  company  than  was 
usually  at  Lenten  sermons ;  and  when  we  had  stayed  there 
an  hour  and  that  the  yard  was  full,  there  being  a  number 


500  HISTORY  OF  THE  ENGLISH  PEOPLE.      [BOOK  VI 

of  torches,  the  Queen  came  out  in  great  state.  Then  we 
cried  'God  save  your  Majesty!  God  save  your  Majesty!' 
Then  the  Queen  turned  to  us  and  said  'God  bless  you  all, 
my  good  people!'  Then  we  cried  again  'God  bless  your 
Majesty !  God  bless  your  Majesty !'  Then  the  Queen  said 
again  to  us,  'You  may  well  have  a  greater  prince,  but  you 
shall  never  have  a  more  loving  prince.'  And  so  looking 
one  upon  another  a  while  the  Queen  departed.  This 
wrought  such  an  impression  on  us,  for  shows  and  pag- 
eantry are  ever  best  seen  by  torchlight,  that  all  the  way 
long  we  did  nothing  but  talk  what  an  admirable  Queen 
she  was,  and  how  we  would  adventure  our  lives  to  do  her 
service."  But  now,  as  Elizabeth  passed  along  in  her  prog- 
resses, the  people  whose  applause  she  courted  remained 
cold  and  silent.  The  temper  of  the  age  in  fact  was  chang- 
ing, and  isolating  her  as  it  changed.  Her  own  England, 
the  England  which  had  grown  up  around  her,  serious, 
moral,  prosaic,  shrank  coldly  from  this  brilliant,  fanciful, 
unscrupulous  child  of  earth  and  the  Renascence. 

But  if  ministers  and  courtiers  were  counting  on  her 
death,  Elizabeth  had  no  mind  to  die.  She  had  enjoyed 
life  as  the  men  of  her  day  enjoyed  it,  and  now  that  they 
were  gone  she  clung  to  it  with  a  fierce  tenacity.  She 
hunted,  she  danced,  she  jested  with  her  young  favorites, 
she  coquetted  and  scolded  and  frolicked  at  sixty-seven  as 
she  had  done  at  thirty.  "The  Queen,"  wrote  a  courtier  a 
few  months  before  her  death,  "  was  never  so  gallant  these 
many  years  nor  so  set  upon  jollity."  She  persisted,  in 
spite  of  opposition,  in  her  gorgeous  progresses  from  coun- 
try-house to  country-house.  She  clung  to  business  as  of 
old,  and  rated  in  her  usual  fashion  "  one  who  minded  not 
to  giving  up  some  matter  of  account."  But  death  crept 
on.  Her  face  became  haggard,  and  her  frame  shrank  al- 
most to  a  skeleton.  At  last  her  taste  for  finery  disap- 
peared, and  she  refused  to  change  her  dresses  for  a  week 
together.  A  strange  melancholy  settled  down  on  her. 
"She  held  in  her  hand,"  says  one  who  saw  her  in  her  last 


CHAP.  7.]         THE  REFORMATION.      1540—1603.  501 

days,  "  a  golden  cup,  which  she  often  put  to  her  lips :  but 
in  truth  her  heart  seemed  too  full  to  need  more  filling." 
Gradually  her  mind  gave  way.  She  lost  her  memory,  the 
violence  of  her  temper  became  unbearable,  her  very  courage 
seemed  to  forsake  her.  She  called  for  a  sword  to  lie  con- 
stantly beside  her  and  thrust  it  from  time  to  time  through 
the  arras,  as  if  she  heard  murderers  stirring  there.  Food 
and  rest  became  alike  distasteful.  She  sat  day  and  night 
propped  up  with  pillows  on  a  stool,  her  finger  on  her  lip, 
her  eyes  fixed  on  the  floor,  without  a  word.  If  she  once 
broke  the  silence,  it  was  with  a  flash  of  her  old  queenliness. 
When  Robert  Cecil  declared  that  she  "  must"  go  to  bed  the 
word  roused  her  like  a  trumpet.  "  Must !"  she  exclaimed ; 
"  is  must  a  word  to  be  addressed  to  princes?  Little  man, 
little  man :  thy  father,  if  he  had  been  alive,  durst  not  have 
used  that  word."  Then,  as  her  anger  spent  itself,  she  sank 
into  her  old  dejection.  "  Thou  art  so  presumptuous, "  she 
said,  "because  thou  knowest  I  shall  die."  She  rallied  once 
more  when  the  ministers  beside  her  bed  named  Lord  Beau- 
champ,  the  heir  to  the  Suffolk  claim,  as  a  possible  successor. 
"I  will  have  no  rogue's  son,"  she  cried  hoarsely,  "in  my 
seat."  But  she  gave  no  sign,  save  a  motion  of  the  head, 
at  the  mention  of  the  King  of  Scots.  She  was  in  fact  fast 
becoming  insensible ;  and  early  the  next  morning,  on  the 
twenty-fourth  of  March,  1603,  the  life  of  Elizabeth,  a  life 
so  great,  so  strange  and  lonely  in  its  greatness,  ebbed 
quietly  away. 


HUD  OP  VOL.  ft 


A     000035631     , 


